


The Anatomy of Melancholy

by ketherphorbia



Series: The Purkinje Effect [2]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Concord, Corvega Assembly Plant, Desomorphine intensifies, Disabled Character, Drug Dealing, Drug Use, Drugging, Drugs, Fictional Pharmacology, Food Squick, Gen, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, In Which Protag Pens Disturbing SI Smut While High Off His Ass, Insects, Introspection, Lexington - Freeform, Man Out of Time, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Postwar Self-Reinvention, Questionable Chemist, Recreational Drug Use, References to Drugs, Sanctuary Hills, Sosu Isn't Nate or Nora, Super Duper Mart, Trans Male Character, Transitioning, like shooting skeet
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-01-09 18:07:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 42,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12281751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ketherphorbia/pseuds/ketherphorbia
Summary: Before the war, the military had extended a military contract to the chemist Melano Kara which afforded him a place in Sanctuary Hills’s Vault 111. When he awakens from cryogenic stasis he hadn’t agreed to, he finds it’s been over two hundred years, and that he’s the only one who survived the freeze–if he can even call it surviving. With the end of the world already so far behind in civilization’s past, he struggles to find his place again. (Previously "The Cure for My Me.")





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2018.05.14.

The air shifted from stale to metallic as the gear-shaped hydraulic lift rose to the surface. Kara squinted through the wrong-prescription eyeglasses he’d retrieved off a desk exiting Vault 111. The gradual ascent could not prepare the wretch for the shift in light intensity as he emerged into stark, cloudless day, and he grunted with a flinch. His vision adjusted a bit better as he stood, in his royal blue and gold-edged vault suit, atop the hill Northwest of Sanctuary Hills. Though he fidgeted uselessly with the focal distance of the lenses up and down his nose, they seemed least of a headache at the tip of his nose. Inversely, he gave up seeking satisfaction from his long, dark mess of hair. With a 10mm pistol in hand he stepped nervously off the margin of the lift platform, following the trail back down to the suburb’s remains.

He hated the thinness of the bodysuit’s fabric. The scientists had told him of the benefits woven into the ultralight materials. Dry wicking. Thermal regulation. All manner of things he couldn’t recall because he’d stopped listening early in Vault-Tec’s rambling self-praise of its own products. He’d stopped listening because they’d told him to remove all clothing and effects before donning the suit. Jewelry, eyeglasses, hair accessories including bobby pins... underwear... foundations... The way the thing hugged his bare body... He really hadn’t mentioned such aversions to anyone. Not since he’d stepped foot on US soil, anyway. But, he couldn’t object to the scientists’ demands, with his neighbors all filing in for their own admission into Vault 111.

Especially not mere minutes after the citizens of Sanctuary Hills in horror watched a mushroom cloud consume Boston as they rode the lift down to safety. Not mere minutes since the military personnel had denied his roommate Jacob entry, when not a week before a representative of theirs had promised him there would pose no issue. He shivered, still breathing hard from the persisting, hoary static which clung to him more fiercely than even the suit.

Just like they’d assured him he and Jacob both had reservations in the vault... they’d assured him he’d have his effects returned to him once the group descended to the lower level of the vault via individual decompression chamber pods. And just like there had been only one reservation, and just like he had found  _no one’s belongings_ on his way escaping the glorified tomb... the decompression chambers were not, in fact, decompression chambers. Shit, how long had they put him on ice? Everyone was dead now. DiPietro, Russell, the Cofrans, the Whitfields, the Callahans, the Ables, even the Murphys. A shudder jolted through him as he passed a pair of skeletons clutching the remnants of a piece of luggage. His head swam, unable to recall just how many people didn’t make it into the vault in time.

They really ended it, didn’t they? He rounded the culs de sac in horror, disliking tremendously the up close affirmation of the desolation which the bombs had wrought. The detonation had reduced the once idyllic suburb to little more than a dozen mounds of steel and concrete, the cars rusted husks of their former selves. Trees and light poles had toppled every which way. He could tell no one had come here in a very long time. How long  _had_ it been? His head hurt. His everything hurt. He could scarce but pray the bombs hadn’t taken out his chem station--or at the very least, the lead lined safe he’d shared with Jacob.

“Sir?”

Kara could recognize the soothing mechanical British intonation as belonging to his Mister Handy. The spherical thruster-hovering legless robot approached him cautiously from around the side of the house. At this point in his day, he’d even believe that his robotic caretaker, bestowed upon him by the DIA’s nationalization program, had survived a nuclear bomb where his house barely could be said to have.

“Oh my stars, it really is you! You look worse for wear.” Its three optical lenses, each mounted at the end of hydraulic stalks with one to the front and the rest to either side, rapidly focused in his face, and its trio of mechanical tendril-like limbs pivoted at what might be called its waist, to produce a variety of different apparatuses at each terminal node. “You require medical attention!”

The survivor welcomed such fawning attention, comforted by the familiar sweet-gas smell of Handy Fuel, and entered the ramshackle skeleton of a building which had once been his house. As he sat on the dilapidated leather couch of now uncertain coloration, the flame-floating robot followed him inside with a faint and gentle rhythmic sibilance. With a slouching sigh, he removed his ill-gotten eyeglasses to put them on the arm of the couch, and he lifted his chin to unbuckle the collar of the vault suit so Angel could get at him.

The Handy pressed a pneumatic syringe to its owner’s neck, and as its contents hissed into his veins, a second arm provided an inhaler against his lips, which he put around the mouthpiece. It counted down aloud from three, then depressed the trigger of the inhaler while putting away the syringe node in the first arm in favor of its default tong-like pincer. Once Kara had taken in the vapor mix in a deep inhalation, the heaviness in his head felt far more pleasant than the prickling heat of the injection hitting him. The third arm of the Handy provided him a liquid to drink, a dark claret colored substance, which he took gladly, not unlike a child to a bottle. He didn’t care how much like cough syrup it tasted like.

“This is the first normal thing that’s happened all day, Angel.”

His eyelids fluttered, head so heavy that he couldn’t manage investigating the state of his bed, in the likelihood it had not survived the fallout. He laid down on the couch, comfortably drowsy from the opiates in the cocktail. Cold metal nudged him to raise his head up off his arms a moment, and when he did, Angel tucked a stuffy pillow under his head. The exhaustion stifled any inspection of stains, let alone any complaints.

“...Spasibo.”

“But of course, Mister Kara-- _but remember to say it in English!_  Ha-ha! I’ve administered Melancholia and a Stimpak, and tended to any illnesses you might have contracted since I last saw you. Do you require anything else before I let you rest?”

“I feel like I’ve been asleep a hundred years,” he whined quietly. He tried uselessly to kick off his boots. The pistol fell to the floor. “There isn’t a blanket, is there. I’m not cold. I just feel. Exposed.”

Before Angel could reply, he was out cold.

Laser fire awakened Kara, and he scrambled to locate the gun to arm himself, his frantic scan of the room yielding no source to the sound, or the burnt smell.

“I’m sorry, Sir, I think I’ve lost them.”

A smoldering pile of ash now existed in the house, which Kara assumed had been another of those awfully huge mutated cockroaches. The irony amused him, that his robotic assistant thought it had failed at exterminating the pest, since the physical proof no longer resembled it.

“Thank you, Angel. Those roaches are terrifying.”

“My records indicate they aren’t the worst thing I’ve encountered since we last met. Did you rest well, Mister Kara? Forgive me that I couldn’t locate any bedding for you.”

Chastising Angel, nor complaining, would do neither of them good.

“I, yes. I did. And it’s fine. I didn’t expect you to. Entertain me, though: How long  _has_  it been since we last met?”

“According to my calculations...” Angel’s ocular lens dulled out of focus a moment. “Approximately two hundred years.”

 _Impossible_ , he mouthed to himself in Russian. Everything he’d read in Vault 111′s terminal entries within the vault itself indicated the scientists had implemented cryogenics as part of the unannounced regimen of the vault program, but it was so unreal. From what he knew of military progress, cryogenics was still a pipe dream before the nuclear exchange, and two  _centuries_? He couldn’t believe science, in the state he’d last known it, could have achieved what it had, if true. “That’s... remarkable.”

“Remarkable is one word for your vanishing act, Sir. I am grateful to sill be here for your return. I apologize that I’ve falling into disrepair since we last met. After several decades, it would have simply been keeping up appearances for myself. Truthfully, I feared you had died like Mister Hawthorne.”

Kara’s heart sank, and he tried his best to focus on watching as the robot did its best to sweep away the pile of insect ashes out the unhinged front door.

“They wouldn’t let him in the gates,” he commented unevenly, a sharp pain throttling his left arm. “That bastard! Told me when I opted into the Vault Protection Program that they’d allow him in--with or without me, if something happened while I was back at the base. I fought like hell with the military personnel. He yelled at me to keep running! Don’t know why I did. Now I’m the last man alive.”

“Not true! And you did what you had to do. You’re here with me now, if that pleases you.”

Kara smiled crookedly, absently touching the long scar that ran from his lower lip all the way down his chin. Even if Jacob had made it into the vault, there’d have been no guarantee that the equipment wouldn’t have asphyxiated or frozen him to death like his neighbors, too. The survivor still didn’t understand why the vault had spared him the same fate as the rest.

“It pleases me that you’re still here. Of course it does.” He blinked dryly a few times, wondering if any of the skeletal remains he passed on his way down the hill had been Jacob. “How far away are the nearest survivors you know of?”

“I ventured to Concord in the past decade or so, in the chance I might encounter you on your way to work. There were people there frightfully interested in dismantling me for scrap. I dismantled the eye of one of them before making an exit. They were... quite rude to me. But you, they might better welcome you.”

Kara got up and walked slowly over to his bedroom, again noting the blown-out walls now little more than their support beams. A glance into his room confirmed his suspicion that the bed had rotted down to its frame. Opening the drawers of the vanity, with its shattered mirror, produced threadbare tatters. He did find his bobby pin box, though, and his silver hairbrush--and his spare glasses, which, like the mirror, the detonation wave had cracked. He took the first two of these and walked across the hall to Jacob’s bedroom with a mixed resignation, and sat with them at the desk.

The wall between the bathroom and Jacob’s room had blown out. Although impressed that the chair, desk, and safe beside it had remained in tact, the capacity to retrieve anything of value from the computer terminal entranced him when he realized it too survived. Cautiously, he booted it up, and while it ran its loading sequence, he tried to brush out his hair. The repetitive motion wore on his joints, and he wheezed in an arthritic ache after mere minutes, having to set down the hairbrush.

Perhaps he simply hadn’t yet completely defrosted.

Easily recalling the password, he skimmed through the menu of the computer. Entries of all their customers, both repeat and potential, formed a sort of invoice of Kara and Jacob’s history together. Nostalgia skimmed his fingers over the names. Rosa... Isaacs... Duchesne. Man, he always wanted to know the story on Duchesne. Now, he might never. Before the bombs, Kara had an issue of the model’s lingerie catalog, and his imagination went sideways trying to figure out what she’d wanted with a dozen Stimpaks a  _week_. He melted whenever he spoke business with her over the phone. She was smooth, brilliant, crazy. Jacob considered it the funniest shit in the world, to watch Kara try to talk to her. (He also often borrowed the catalog.)

Once he’d gotten his fix rereading his partner’s invoice narratives, he returned to the main menu and entered the password to the safe.  _Incorrect_. Exhaling, he tried another it might be.  _Incorrect_. Rather than lock himself out of the terminal, he dismantled the tension trigger to a bomb failsafe. At least he had the faculty to recall the presence of  _that_. Then, he produced a bobby pin from the sliding-lid aluminum case and bent it open, and using the screwdriver he’d picked up on his way out of the vault, he proceeded to pick the lock instead. Like riding a bike.

Once the door opened, Kara shoved the contents around looking for something specific, but when he did not find it, his face screwed up and he laid down for some time in the floor between the safe and the rotted-out bed frame. A fistful of cash, a few boxes of 10mm ammunition, two Stimpaks, and an ampuole of Jet. Collecting himself, he scooped up the various things and put them on the desk together. Then, he rummaged in Jacob’s closet in the hopes of better luck with clothing survivors. A dress shirt, suspenders, and slacks would have to do. Trying them on reminded him that although his roommate hadn’t been overweight, he’d certainly been heavier than the scrawny miscreant Kara was. He praised the suspenders for keeping the pants up.

“Angel, in your time around Sanctuary, do you remember if anyone’s sewing machine survived?”

The Handy had busied itself in the living area, but with the walls lacking substance, conversation came easily from one room to the next.

“I believe so, Sir. Just the one, though, I’m afraid.”

“Could you... show me where?”

“I can show you where any equipment’s survived, if that pleases you.”

“That would please me so tremendously, Angel.  _Thank you_.”

In that moment he felt a twinge of positivity and excitement for the first time since he’d awoken from his bicentennial stasis.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara can't recognize the transfigured Commonwealth, but some of it might recognize him.
> 
> Updated 2018.05.30.

Once he’d sufficiently tailored the slacks and dress shirt, Kara spent the rest of the afternoon and evening assessing potential salvage among the wreckage of the small suburb. He and Jacob maintained terminal entries on all their clients, and on behalf of Jacob that included casing information regarding the locations of those individuals’ safes. The three besides their own yielded a reliquary of heirlooms crafted from precious metals as well as cash, and he amassed it all though he fostered no belief money would retain value as more than a scrap of cloth to survivors of the nuclear exchange. It takes a government to cast the shadow of a gold or silver standard, and the chemist doubted in dire earnest there existed any such establishment now.

He combed the handful of houses still half-standing, inspected mailboxes both those still upright and those knocked clear into others’ yards, rooted through garages and the shells of once vehicles; but, he gained scant notable additions compared to those retrieved from his prior home. Either time had erased the quality of most things, or those evacuating to Vault 111 had taken the best things with them only to have them discarded by the shills running it. Further insects argued with the chemist’s presence in their homes, but Angel made quick work of the enormous mutant flies and roaches.

Angel’s back panel espoused rather spacious storage. Unbeknownst to the Handy, its owner had hollowed out a small false bottom to this compartment, where he’d kept things such as his Melancholia during his active duty–but now, he fattened it with cash and valuables as he encountered them, and stored the chems in the main space. The compartment soon filled with a collection of tools, and household and backyard chemicals he could recall would prove useful to him once he found someplace stable and secure enough. The Vault Suit itself got crammed furthest in, out of sight and out of mind.

Unnervingly, he knew he couldn’t stay put for long, for he found almost no shelf-stable food: only a small cache of Salisbury steaks and canned water in Heydar Jahani’s small cellar shelter. It seared Kara that Vault-Tec had not extended invitation into Vault 111 to Jahani, despite his veteran status, while they’d invited both himself and the Murphys. Albeit crystal hindsight, he wished he  _didn’t_  understand the grounds upon which the vault might have rejected the one vet while fondly welcoming the other three. Military duty at the Deenwood Compound had broken Kara and Jahani in very different ways. As he helped himself to Jahani’s dirt-dark two hundred year old stout stash, he recalled that Nora Murphy had been in the army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, and wondered if she could have ever resolved a workman’s compensation claim for the poor soul, given the chance.

Kara doubted it.

Besides a pair of X-Cell inhalers from the Russells’ floor safe, only the contents of the first aid kits and medicine cabinets held any value. His stomach hardened to see Jacob’s hunch checked out: along with the performance enhancer had lain a ledger of dog fighting bets. Russell had been doping dogs with it. Kara supposed the political climate leading up to the nuclear exchange had warped just about everyone’s rationality and sensibilities.

The chemist most loathed his inability to locate any Mentats whatsoever in Sanctuary. The longer Kara  _existed_  again, the more he understood his constitution was fundamentally wrong. He struggled through murky, resistant acuity, noting a patchy memory and also difficulty pairing information. He at once felt both too loose and too stiff in most joints. He couldn’t see as well as he remembered he could. The disposition of his flesh rendered itself papery and pliant, while equally infirm. Everything took two or three times the extra effort to accomplish, down to putting one foot before the other… The cryogenesis must have surely wrought him rheumatic, and the opioids in his Melancholia cocktail had only masked the pain, not improved his function, and he opted to save the narcotics rather than plow through them since they didn’t much seem to help anyway. Between the limited food supplies and increasingly likely chronic pain, he resolved to push on to Concord proper. In the morning.

Returning to the vault overnight didn’t even dawn on him. Vulnerable everywhere else, he ate dinner in Jahani’s cellar and slept there.

When he emerged the following day, Kara located Angel and loaded the cellar’s supplies into it, then the two made a quick round to guarantee they hadn’t left anything especially important. He snacked on a can of pork n’ beans as he walked Southeast to the footbridge out of town.

“Just a bit overcast. Fine weather to walk to work, isn’t it, Sir?”

“You could say that.”

Once he’d polished off the fermented mess of proteins, he tossed the can and pocketed the spoon. He stepped around the fresh corpses of a man and a mangy dog in the road. There were bite marks. With a hard swallow, he pulled out his gun and looked around more intently than before as he continued down the broken asphalt.

“I hope Miss Gretchen doesn’t chastise us for being so late,” Angel commented darkly. “Surely, she’d understand.”

“Positive that’s not going to be an issue.”

Kara whipped face-down to the crumbling asphalt too fast to think he’d tripped on it. Something had grabbed his ankle, and he rolled over to try to kick them. With a frothy growl, the thing which looked to once be human lashed out at him with too-long fingernails. A second kick gave him enough time to steady his hands to fire at it. Heart between his ears, his eyes whipped around to recognize these things surrounded him, and if they hadn’t noticed him before the gunfire, they certainly had now.

“Terrific!” Angel beamed, switching out its pincer attachments for its laser and circular saw. “It’s a fight then!”

“…God…”

Kara glazed with dread, trembling as these mutated, misshapen ghouls shambled closer. In naked tatters, their complexion and hair had burned and melted, their black eyes sank deep in their faces, and their apparent bone structure was lost in wanderlust. When one abruptly scrambled to run and lunge at him with a guttural yowl, he screamed and unloaded the entire clip at it. He continued pulling the trigger on the empty pistol as the thing crumpled lifeless at his feet atop the first one. He pushed backwards as fast as he could to back himself into the embankment beside the road, eyes frozen open with grief.

All the while, Angel hummed eagerly while it deftly mowed down several of them.

“…Indhhh–” A third one glared at Kara, and he frantically reloaded from his slacks pocket. But, the ghoul simply stood there, breathing heavy and letting out a faint growl. It lacked a nose, and its jawline had rotted down to mere teeth, its thyroid hanging massive like a crop from a horribly elongated neck. The hairless, earless thing squinted, clearly pained. “ _Mhhh. Ghgh’dy_.”

When the ghoul did not advance, Kara’s eyes darted to the others that had opted to attack the shiny flaming robot rather than him.  _Mindy._ Horror seized him when he realized this thing recognized him, and did his best to aim his pistol at it, distrustful. Angel continued to contend with the dozen or so others, the violence framing this one and himself in a solipsistic, distorted sphere.

“…Jacob?” The breath to speak could scarce escape him. A drooling roar came from it, and the tears started. “Jacob, I’m sorry…”

“ _Khhh, llm_.”  _Kill me_. It took a step toward him. “Hhree.”  _Hurry? …Free?_

“I don’t understand.” He shook his head at it, gaze unable to stay on any one feature too long. “What… what are you?” Suddenly, it clicked what Angel was doing and he screamed, nauseated mouth suffusing with desperate saliva. “ _ANGEL STOP!_ ”

The last of the ghouls fell to the road and Angel turned in confusion to its owner.

“You missed one, Sir.”

“These… these…” He couldn’t breathe. “ _These_  are what’s left of Sanctuary!?”

“Feral ghouls are everywhere these days, I’m afraid,” the robot replied, poised to fell the ghoul between them upon command. “Allow me to get this one, Sir.”

“I, no. No. I can’t.” He glanced up at the Red Rocket filling station behind it and Angel. “I can’t. Please. Can we leave him here? At the truck stop?”

Its ocular lenses shuffled around to scrutinize the ghoul.

“I suppose. It doesn’t seem to wish harm like the others.”

He couldn’t believe Angel couldn’t understand. The more he stared at the ghoul, the more he could recognize the vestiges of Jacob’s features. He stood slowly, as not to unsettle the ghoul, and dropped the pistol hand to his side. With the other, he pointed to the filling station.

“You… you’ve been staying here? Right? Because the insects are bothering you back at the house?”

The ghoul forced through its exposed turbinates a long breath which turned into a whine.

“Khhh, llm.  _Kkhhh_. Mhh’d.”

“Jacob, no.”

Barking closed in on the paused chaos, and a sizable ramshackle dog stopped mere yards away, lowering its head to growl. Angel and Kara both moved to aim at the unpredictable new threat, but the ghoul started toward it, and crooked down slightly to pet the German shepherd’s head. The dog softened and pulled at what was left of the ghoul’s trousers to lead it back to the filling station. The moment the dog had appeared, the ghoul lost all attention on Kara and his Mister Handy, and cared only about the dog.

“…He’s… got a friend left, at least.” Kara nearly dropped the gun in shock, but caught himself and turned on the safety before pocketing it. He looked around at the casualties littering the road, then back to the Red Rocket. “I’m not sure this is better than him dying.”

“Come now, Mister Kara. We can mull over such existential preponderances during your work break! We’re late enough as it is.”

The chemist’s fingers retraced his platysmal scar again, and he drew a difficult breath and shut his eyes.

“Let’s get going.”

The pair traveled through the decimated streets of Concord, following their routine track to and from work. A town devoid of population unsettled Kara more than the same of a small suburb. What remained of Walden Drugs did not invite them. The roof of the two story building had fallen, but the second story’s floor still shielded the first from the dreary drizzling which had set in during the confrontation.

“Go upstairs ahead of me,” Kara instructed. Once it had gone, he crouched behind the counter and rummaged the shelves, drawers, and cabinets. He emptied out the first aid tin on the wall of its Stimpak, gauze, and smelling salts, and took the box of ballpoint pens and a fistful of manila folders from the front counter’s hanging file drawer as well. In the drawer he put his hands on a pair of directories–one, of the employees, the other, of nearby drugstores and chemists. One of the locations in the latter would have to provide him supplies, and the closer, the better.  _Lexington Walden._  He shut the directory and with a nod slapped his peeling counter with the wad of papers. Out of habit, the fifteen dollars still inexplicably in the till found its way into his pocket.

He ascended the stairs with the files under his arm, and everything else awkwardly in his trouser pockets. The light rain annoyed him only slightly less than finding that so little remained of his former workplace. The desks had rusted and rotted out, despite a scab of papers plastered to the floor by centuries of weather, and the inventory had been looted. From a metal storage box near the baseboards, he grabbed a bottle of Wonderglue and a box of .38 bullets. Then he got Angel’s attention to deposit everything in its storage compartment.

Pulling out the box of bobby pins to reuse the one he’d bent up the day before, he approached the small wall safe that had once belonged to Gretchen, the store owner. Angel idled anxiously, finding little to occupy itself.

“I wonder where Miss Gretchen and the others are.”

Kara did not respond, haunted as ever by this nightmare he’d awoken to, lost in thought as he struggled with the sophisticated lock. He couldn’t handle the idea his boss, or any of his coworkers, had suffered the same fate as his roommate and the others. Jacob’s face wouldn’t quit him. His friend had been so plain before, but he was so… beautiful now. When he caught himself in such thoughts, he shook his head of them and had to stop a moment to recollect himself. God, he needed a drink.

His boss’s safe gave him more trouble than his own, but the effort yielded him a .38 pistol with a wood-panel grip and a fine scope, as well as war bonds and a set of spare keys which no longer belonged to anything. Well, the scope seemed wonderful by comparison, anyway, to the shoddy company-issue 10mm pistol with iron sights he’d nicked off the corpse of that Vault 111 security guard. The chemist favored it, and stored the 10mm in Angel.

Descending back to the main floor, the nag graced him with a difficult and thoughtful squint: “Did I… clock out that day…?” But then, he noticed the cardstock had plastered into mush in the slots of the time card rack, and he stared vacantly for some time at the clock itself.  _Suppose it’s 9:47am forever._  He shook the nonsense from his brain and very much just wanted to leave, and yet… He hadn’t checked the mudroom.

As he walked behind the counter again, and back under the stairwell, he stopped, stunned. The lockers to the left had remained untouched, and everyone’s coats still hung to the right--including the garment bag he’d had ready for the evening the bombs fell.

_Saturday morning, Jacob had dropped Carey off at work. The Pharmacy Corps veteran had brought his uniform with him, to change into after his shift. Their neighbor, Nate Murphy, was also a much-decorated veteran of Anchorage, though he’d been at the Alaskan war front as a soldier, while the chemist had stayed on base here in Massachusetts. Nate was to give a speech at the Concord Veteran’s Hall that night, and everyone in Sanctuary Hills was going, out of a mixture of enthusiasm and moral support. Even Jahani intended to go, and Kara found it odd though never mentioned it._

_But then, around 9:30, the screaming and chaos began. Carey had thought it had been yet another riot outbreak, but then Jacob’s sky blue Chryslus Coupe jumped the front curb, and he got out without turning off. The thirty-some blond hopped the counter and, beyond words, dragged Carey out of the pharmacy by the wrist. Because the chemist’d had his nose buried in his work, the repairman had heard news of the apocalypse first. Walden Drugs didn’t have a television in its waiting area._

_“Angel!” Jacob demanded. “Go home. Wait for us there.”  
_

_“Mister Hawthorne--” Angel looked between the two of them, trying to follow both figuratively and literally. It read the gravity and concern in his voice. “Yes, Sir.”  
_

_Carey tried to pull away from him._

_“Jacob, if this is about keeping me from going tonight--”_

_The blond threw him into the passenger seat and slammed the door, to get in the driver’s seat himself.  
_

_“We have to go, Carey._ Now _.”_

_“But I didn’t clock out--”  
_

_“It’s started. Those fucking pieces of shit--”  
_

_Jacob turned on the car radio, and didn’t have to tune--the news was on every station._

_“--We’ve lost contact with New York and Philadelphia. Confirmed nuclear detonations across the country. A blast, followed by a bright flash of light. Take shelter, if you have it. Oh. God help us all--”_

_“We don’t have much time. Can’t even stop at the house first. I’m gonna park at the foot of the hill and you get a head start running to the military check-point. Okay? I’m one step behind you.”  
_

Except, the military check-point had rejected the non-veteran in favor of the veteran. Unable to bring himself to think again so soon of his roommate’s fate, he instead recalled the frost-mangled countenances of everyone back in the vault. Nate never would get to deliver his veteran’s speech. Heart stabbing his arm, the chemist unzipped the garment bag, to find the Pharmacy Corps uniform nearly pristine. The nameplate read  _A. Carey_. His hand clapped to his mouth, and he collapsed in the mudroom to his knees in tears.

“Of all the things to have survived in tact–”

He laid in the floor for some time, cradling the garment bag, and he finally let himself cry out the trauma after days spent in total shock. Angel came to the doorway once it heard him.

“Sir, are you… are you injured?”

“O– only spiritually.”

With a series of hard snorts and hacks, and a face a blur of swelling, he proceeded to try to focus on picking open all the lockers to retrieve valuables. In addition to smoking paraphernalia, timepieces, and a few hats including a visor, he also obtained several wallets; all of these, he poured into Angel, with the sacked uniform folded neatly atop the entire cache. The finesse of such a task grounded him enough to move on, ears no longer ringing by the time they left the pharmacy.

As the two exited to the street, they noticed nearing gunfire and panicked to outpace it. Slowing a bit a few blocks later, a winded Kara came across a body on the sidewalk, and he knelt down to remove the canvas hood. Deranged from the day, he put it on and aligned the small eye-holes, and pushed onward in the hopes nothing else would recognize him from that point onward.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara must not seem to think molerat is edible, hm.

The Pip-Boy at Kara’s right wrist served as a useful compass, to guide him Southeast out of Concord. Ten years in service, wearing one all the while, had given him ample time to adjust to the boxy shape of the grey-green device as though an extension of his person. He consistently failed to notice he even had on this one that he’d stolen off the body of one of the Vault 111 scientists in the vault gate atrium. In the military, he’d had a Pip-Boy 3000 Mark III, which at the time of its issue superseded any other models in terms of functions and performance. Kara hadn’t had a chance to really inspect this newer Mark IV model, only noted its user health diagnostics had no grasp as to a cause for his diminishing quality of life, and of course now, used its refined GPS mapping to navigate. He’d have to see what all the thing could do compared to its predecessor. The thing was far lighter and less bulky, but it didn’t have the Nostrus glove anymore, so he had no idea how to input data into it. It would take time to learn the nuances of the device, and now was not that time. As a southpaw, he simply appreciated they hadn’t done away with the ambidextrous property of the Mark line.

After a while, a hurricane fence jotted along the left of the road, and the drizzle shifted into a downpour. Once he recognized the flying saucer sculpture which topped the small two-story structure and knew the exact property which the fence rounded, he and Angel raced to get under the place’s awnings, which resembled two airplane wings (albeit one had broken off and crushed an automobile that had crashed into the ticket booth pillars).

The Starlight Drive-In Theater. He and Jacob had come here often in Jacob’s sky blue Chryslus Coupe: Kara would take in the latest horror films, while his roommate usually had more interest in completing chem deals. They both got something out of the venue. Soaked, Kara held his chilled shoulders and stared at the enormous projector screen at the other end of the lot, ripped but still largely, impressively, in tact. It upset him that he couldn’t remember the last film he’d seen before they’d frozen him.  _Night of the Fish Man’s Revenge_  didn’t sound right.  _Nuka-Valley Massacre?_

The awning belonged to the concessions stand and projector booth. He glanced around the long countertop which curved around the entire front end of the stand facing the screen. Time, or the bombs, had blown out the glass of its windows. Unnerved, he paused when he saw a makeshift bomb on the counter.

“Angel, don’t make any sudden movements.”

He reached out with caution, and, keeping his arms at full distance, lightly nudged the wiring so he could scrutinize the construction. With the rain coming down like this, he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and he  _had_  to disarm this thing. Fortunately for him, the bomb’s maker had crudely crafted it with a lunch-kit, duct tape, and uncapped wire twists. Unsure as to the explosive inside, he didn’t breathe until the wires had all been completely separated from one another. For safe measure, he picked it up by the handle and flung it into the middle of the drive-in’s parking lot. He jumped when it still exploded anyway, and the detonation knocked a station-wagon on its side.

“Bang-up job, Sir.”

“...Funny, Angel.”

“I thought so.” It gave him a holographic laugh, and did the honors of opening the employee door to enter the concessions stand. Before either of them knew it, Angel was kicked back outside with a second blast. “That’ll leave a dent.”

“Are. Are you okay?” With a slouch, Kara muttered to himself, very much needing to sit down, out of the rain. He found the stairs which led up to the projection booth and settled on that. “Hopefully that’s the only booby traps.”

“Quite. It’s just a scratch, Sir.” The Handy came inside the booth with its owner, and inspected the storage beneath the concessions counter. “You don’t suppose they’ll mind if we take these snack foods, so long as we deposit the correct compensation to the register, do you?”

Kara stared at it for a minute, head still swimming far too much to handle this.

“I very much don’t think there’s anyone who will mind if we take the potato crisps, and the gum drops, and the Fancy Lads,  _and_ the contents of the till.”

“Oh. ...My.” It complied in collecting the foods, but left the cash for its owner, who did take it. “Still, I wonder what might be the value in this place, for it to boast so many points of sabotage.”

“I think the staff, and maybe some customers, took shelter here, only for the radiation to kill them. There’s probably nothing actually here. Still, you’ve got me curious to look around in the projection booth.”

“I’ll keep watch down here whilst you do.”

Kara slowly ascended the stairs, and praised that he’d watched his feet as he walked, able to bend down and disarm a makeshift landmine and pick it up. A door opened out onto the wing still propped up on the ticket booth pillars, and he threw it like a disc, aiming for the street. It hit one of the cars instead of coming anywhere close to the street. First, the mine exploded. Then, the car’s nuclear engine did. Removed from the carnage, he could get a chuckle out of the destruction.

Rounding to the second floor, he a skeleton with a 10mm pistol on a mattress. Several weather-decimated reels lay in the front corner, but he could not locate the projector itself. He supposed the survivors had dismantled it to repair and craft things more useful than watching the same four films for years. Still, it felt like a slap to art history, to have destroyed equipment for viewing films. Clearly, he’d encountered proof in his time above-ground that humans had survived besides himself, though he couldn’t guess whether they still made films, or if they even could. And many films were formative media for him. Prior often called an English textbook by his army colleagues, he’d improved the casual nuances of speaking colloquial English by bingeing on horror movies on his weekends off the base.

He adored creatures. He adored creatures more than anything. And now, the nuclear exchange had sprawled out a vast wasteland and set in motion the transformation, transfiguration, of the life of the New England Commonwealth, and likely the whole planet. Fiction and reality might not remain so dissimilar from one another.

The reels retained legible labels.  _Night of the Fish Man’s Revenge. The Chatreuse Slime 3: Slime Doesn’t Pay. My Husband the Mutant._  It dawned on him that the bombs fell a mere week before Halloween. All of these, he’d enjoyed, but the last of them had been a favorite of his. Very satisfying practical effects, with very little holo-projection technology. And, of course, the ending was most satisfying of all to him. The wife’s unyielding fidelity through the husband’s gradual, slimy disfigurement exposes her to the same mutagens that had made him monstrous, and she in fact becomes a mutant herself--and she joins him in the shadows.

The sounds of laser fire and the repeated powering up of a circular saw jarred him out of nostalgia, and he hurried down the stairs and out onto the roof of the concessions stand. The rain had stopped while he was upstairs.

"I don’t feel pain, you know.” Angel whipped its saw at a creature. “Is that all you’ve got!”

__Angel’s changed a lot while I was asleep._  It sure has grown most complacent to acting upon violence._

Kara used the sights of the .38 as a sort of spyglass to see the action in the parking lot. The best he could assess, the explosions had nettled the place’s inhabitants, which now attacked his Handy. They squealed shrilly and tried to bite Angel. Enormous tailless cats with huge protruding fangs. Or possibly... moles? As they continued to burst out of the ground, the latter felt like the better approximation.

“I’ve got your back, friend.”

He aimed and picked one off. Laughing to himself at the success, he cleared out as many more as he could. After a few, Angel noticed Kara helping him and it began to hum enthusiastically at the collaborative nature of the task. He lost count how many he shot. Once it seemed safe to return to ground level, he walked out among the cars and started looking for valuables.

“Thank you for the support.”

“It’s all my f-- my pleasure. Glad I could help.”

He picked the lock on the utility shed, but rounded back to the screen itself. Under the stairs, he encountered a mess of empty beer bottles, and a chem cooler with two doses of Jet. With ennui, he pocketed them and moved on to letting himself into the storeroom built into the backside of the projector screen. A RadRoach argued with him, but met his boot. He took the one box of BlamCo Mac on the shelves and ignored everything else, and walked around to the manager’s office to the end of the storeroom.

“At this rate, I’m not going to have any bobby pins left by the end of the week.”

He opened the door and looked around. Sure enough, someone had tried to settle down here. A mattress and a baby crib cramped the tight space, and carton after carton of Yum Yum Deviled Eggs filled the fridge. He found no signs of recent life, however, and loaded up the food into Angel’s storage, along with the chems.

“I... I don’t feel safe staying here tonight,” he admitted to Angel. He internalized the self-honesty that he didn’t like that it was looking as though he’d have to foster a migrant life whenever food supplies dried up. “There might be more of those... things. Starting to understand the reason for all the traps.”

“Don’t push yourself too hard,” the Handy objected thoughtfully. “Where are we off to, then, if we don’t remain?”

“The Lexington Walden Drugs. It’s bigger than the Concord one, and more likely still standing. Here, I need the directory again.” He dug it out of Angel’s compartment and skimmed over it. “I’ve only ever been there by bus, and only a few times. It’s on Massachusetts Avenue, but I don’t remember how to get there. I need to give Gretchen credit for this, though. She wrote down landmarks to follow for customers who struggle with compass based or street based directions. The state things are in, I doubt most street signs are still legible, if they’re standing at all.”

“Miss Gretchen is quite the smart cookie.” Angel pivoted its tendrils close to its body, anxious as to what the real reason might be that its owner so doggedly sought a pharmacy. “We’re almost to Lexington from here, by my calculations, Sir. We should be able to get there by sundown. ...Provided it doesn’t rain again...”

“Let’s... let’s keep moving. This wasn’t a bad detour. We found more food.”

“Ah yes, your favorites, as I recall.”

“Yum.”

The striped smoke stacks of the Corvega Automotive Assembly Plant peaked in the distance, and Kara sighed pleasantly to know he was going in the right direction. The high rises of Lexington stood mostly in one piece, it seemed, and this sight reassured him.

Slocum’s Joe Coffee Shop came up first on their way into town. The register didn’t have much in it, but he found a few sweet rolls and more Fancy Lads in the back room. He’d stepped into the establishment to raid it for coffee, though, and while he found four bags of whole beans, the grinder looked ruined. He handed off the coffee to Angel, and continued down the street.

As night fell, he turned on the display light of his Pip-Boy to illuminate his path. In the dark, the still-standing city no longer comforted him, and the slightest sound afforded his attention.

To his left he passed a parking garage--the lot for the Super Duper Mart, he recalled, as he passed the grocer’s outdoor patio with its accordion awning. Rounding the corner, he referenced the directions again.

_Pass the Slocum’s Joe to the left, then turn left around the Super Duper Mart. You’ll be on the Lexington Commons. Take to the right on Massachusetts Avenue. Pass the Liquors store, turn right at the red house with all those lawn flamingoes. There’ll be a three-story building right across from it, with a big yellow ‘Pharmacy’ sign and blue awnings. Can’t miss it._

Unwanted attention had crept up on the pair while Kara inspected the directions, and he broke into a sprint across the triangular Commons at the first understanding that the sounds of the shadows had been from more feral ghouls.

“Have at you!” Angel waved its tendril-saw at them, facing them as it flew backwards to catch up with its owner, who’d long since darted around the maze of abandoned cars and upturned picnic tables and come out the other side of the once-park still running.

All manner of cursing coursed through his mind as his stomach churned in his heart. He couldn’t keep up this pace long enough to get to the--  _there’s the Liquors_.  _There’s the red house._  Angel sped to close the gap between him and itself, and he didn’t want to think his Handy had gotten chicken. His head hammered as he slammed into the red wood-panel front door of the pharmacy and pawed at the handle to run inside.

Kara collapsed over the counter the instant he got in. His blood pulsed everywhere it ought not in him, and eyes wild, he scanned the lantern-lit space trying to identify at a glance which of the corpses had worked here. One of them still had their apron draped around them, and he scrambled through the pockets with a prayer. Breathlessly praising they’d been the acting manager, he took the keys to the front door and bestowed the two of them some relative safety. Then, he slid down the door to sit on the floor.

“Too much for one day. Please, no more.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara gets a moment of quiet.
> 
> Updated 2018.05.18.

Kara forced himself to stand again, no longer tolerating the floor, still nearly heaving. The twin phone booth chairs had fallen apart, and locals had looted the waiting area seating. His eyes fell near the checkout to the overturned wheelchair, rusted tight, and righted it independent of its previous owner in the floor, so that it might provide him the first chance he’d really had the entire day to sit down for any length of time. Albeit sturdy, it clearly would no longer move.

The heavy breath that came next deflated him. He slung off the sack hood into his lap, and shakily helped himself to a cigarette, as he’d stolen the silver case and gold lighter from DiPietro’s coffee table in Sanctuary. Menthols tasted better than this, but he couldn’t complain. The main light in the store front came from a flameless lantern on the counter; since such things ran on fusion cells, he couldn’t really estimate how long it had been left on. He took in further details of the demolished shop from where he sat. Everything had fallen off the shelves, including the shelves themselves, and the front windows had been boarded up in the absence of glass panes. Some of his faculties crept back into him, and he resolved he’d scrounge for supplies in the floor rubbish once he’d finished his cigarette. His spirit popped in one place, reflecting on the reality that even if the wheelchair were still operational, that it bore no feasible function in the post-apocalypse.

Angel watched its owner curiously.

“Sir, can I be of any service? My sensors indicate you’re unwell, though diagnostics can’t pinpoint anything besides an unusual level of fatigue. Perhaps you’ve pushed yourself too hard. This location seems most secure. I surveyed the stock room, and it seems the neighboring building collapsed and caused a good bit of damage to this one. We needn’t worry about securing the back way, for the time being. Dare I recommend some solid rest?”

The Handy was right about one thing: Everything felt more difficult than he ever remembered it. Upon his robot’s commentary, he noticed he was still wheezing, and shakily took another hit off his smoke. The ashes ended up in his lap before he could flick them into the floor, and though his face soured, he left them, too tired to bother.

Could he blame the ambient radiation? His Pip-Boy’s Geiger counter didn’t indicate an especially high level of it anywhere he’d been so far, including the vault itself. Maybe he’d contracted some strain of cold? No, Vault 111′s cryogenic chemical process had to have done this to him. The accessible terminal entries hadn’t listed off most of the chemicals, but he’d come across many empty canisters in the vault with labels suggesting they’d once contained liquid nitrogen. Very little could survive that kind of freeze without tissue damage.

Kara figured he could chalk up the deep aches to the onset of arthritis, but at the same time that assumption couldn’t accurately account for how loose the joints in his body had become. He huffed, tired of trying to piece it all together. He nearly couldn’t point at what he wanted, his features drooping against his will.

“Angel. Bring me the book under the counter there.”

“Absolutely.” Eager for a command to follow, it retrieved the periodical for its owner and deposited it in his lap. It looked him over for a long spell. “…You don’t think you’ll be needing the wheelchair, will you, Sir?”

With a hard sigh, he rubbed his forehead with his cigarette hand, and he uselessly pushed his long, sweaty dark hair out of his face. He preferred to look at the cover of the literature rather than make eye contact over this. As anticipated, the periodical was a catalog which listed the company’s broad mail-order inventory.

“No, no. We’re going to try to figure out a way without it. Hairbrush, please.”

Again, Angel obliged. More persistent this time than before, Kara brushed out his hair, which fell just past his shoulders. He reached into his pocket and slid the bobby pin tin open on the periodical in his lap, cigarette filter pursed between his lips while he worked. Between his aches and lack of a mirror, pulling off a french twist from muscle memory troubled him, and some of it still readily fell loose to either side of his face. But, he could tolerate this far better than just letting his whole hair stay down. Satisfied, he flipped through the catalog while he finished his smoke. The words looked like an alien language in his exhaustion, and he struggled anything more than just the pictures.

Kara pushed himself up out of the wheelchair and emphatically smacked the catalog onto the counter beside the register, which he readily emptied. The tin went atop the book until he next needed it. He didn’t waste any time digging in the fallen aisle shelving, though he reserved the added effort of getting down in the floor for a suspicion that something he saw looked worth it.

“Sir,” Angel started. “You haven’t eaten anything as of recent, nor drunk any water. You should do so and rest. We can clean up the pharmacy in the morning.”

“I came here for specifics. I’ll take a break when I can, not when I feel like it. I need what I’m looking for.”

“Perhaps I can help then?”

Kara leaned on the counter, consenting to the assistance. He flipped through the catalog and opened it to a particular page, to point to the items on it.

“We’re looking for orthotics, Angel. They look like this, out of the box. Any of them will help me, to be honest. I’m falling apart.”

“I’m worried for you. You haven’t been this worse for wear before. Not even during that terrible bout of influenza back in ‘68.”

The chemist nearly didn’t reply, the words glued in his mouth.

“I know. And this should help. Help me find these.”

“…Yes, Sir.”

Angel seemed nearly hesitant, lacking a better explanation as to the need for such a thing. It recalled that Kara tended not to elaborate when things were beyond his capacity to put in words, English or Russian, and it found such things typically emotional in nature. Rather than mull on it, it set itself to searching the floor debris for their prize, while its owner continued at shelf level.

Kara observed over time that, as it scrutinized each thing it came across, Angel had been instinctively cleaning up the small demolished store front. It had mostly mounded up the debris into the front corner, and it had even been reassembling the salvageable aisle shelving as able. The Handy also had relocated the wheelchair to sit along the wall, directly behind the counter. Ironically, it had righted the wire waste bin, but neither of them had used it so far. Still, they had a lot of work cut out for them, for the pharmacy to be comfortably habitable long-term.

The chemist found a wooden cane, and began to use it as he moved around the pharmacy. He found it helped quite a bit. Few chems remained, mostly a fistful of Med-X and a few bottles of Buffout on the surface skim. Upon further scrutiny of his Handy’s endeavors, Kara noticed Angel had been depositing its finds at eye level on the shelving it nonchalantly repaired along the way. There were a myriad of good medical paraphernalia among them, but nothing Kara could call orthotic in nature.

Three pair of glasses sat on one shelf, and he hooked the cane on his arm while he tried them out. Though the real test would be in sufficient lighting, the white-rimmed round frames seemed nearly perfect by comparison to the ones he’d taken from the Vault 111 personnel, and he lauded his Handy without ado.

“I do think this place will do nicely for a spell. And you found such useful things, like these.” He touched his frames with a faint smile. “We should stay while I form a better plan. I agree with you. This place feels secure. I have enough food reserves from Sanctuary, Concord, and Starlight to last me two or three weeks, if I ration myself. From how smashingly you’ve cleaned up here in even the past half hour, this place feels nearly hospitable. Thank you, Angel.” He patted the robot’s spherical chassis endearingly when it came up to him. “I would like to take a break from combing this place for the orthotics to eat something, though.”

“I’m glad I could be of service. You’re most welcome!” It helped Kara back to the wheelchair and indulged him with a tin of Salisbury steak, a fork, and a can of purified water, which he took gladly. “It won’t bother you, for me to busy myself around the pharmacy, will it, Sir? It’s been so long since I’ve felt a sense of normalcy myself, and I’ve missed housekeeping in remotely normal conditions more than you can imagine.”

“So long as you don’t use any power tools, or break any glass.” Kara smiled at him. “I suppose this place does feel a bit… normal, doesn’t it.”

“It’s no Concord Walden Drugs, but we’ll have it tip-top in no time, Sir. I’ll be certain not to disturb you while you rest, I promise!”

Its enthusiasm algorithms fired at near maximum capacity in that moment, and it didn’t hesitate to set out a bed roll in the far corner for him, so that it could resume picking up the place now that it had permission to.

Kara left the half-drunk can of water on the counter, as well as the empty meat tin and utensil, and excused himself to the employees only back room to inspect the facilities. His stomach didn’t agree with his options in food rations, but he’d have to make do for now. Much of the front end was in better shape than the back room, owing to the miniature earthquake that must have rattled the entire building when the other had fallen against it. By the light of his Pip-Boy, he could really only make out some cartons of Halloween-colored ribbon candy.

He found the toilet and made use of it, and though he got it to flush, he didn’t try the sink because he didn’t trust the water source for washing his hands or face. He returned to the front end and collapsed into his unpadded bedding, not even covering up or disrobing. After a moment face-down, he removed his glasses and tried to kick off his boots, and pushed the cane out of the bedding onto the floor.

All he wanted more than anything was a bath. He didn’t recall having had one since emerging from the vault. The water had worked at the vault, he remembered–but did he really have to travel all the way back to Sanctuary Hills on foot, when the vault had only had showers and no bathtubs?

The last thing he heard before drifting off to dream of a lavish bubble bath was, “Rest well, Mister Kara.”

Kara jolted awake with the memory of ghoul Jacob inches from his face. Sweating, he panted and curled up tight atop the sleeping bag. He let out a soft moan and squinted his eyes shut again, trying to fall back asleep. The worst part was, it hadn’t felt like it had been a nightmare. Quite the opposite.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The true value of the Lexington Pharmacy begins taking shape.
> 
> Updated 2018.05.18.

The dull, pleasant white noise of Angel’s thruster flame, commingled with occasional gentle shuffling and rattling, comforted Kara as he awoke for the day. One corner of his mouth twitched upward as he turned over to feel for his glasses, which he found on the bottom-most shelf of the aisle shelving. Angel had placed them and his cane on the shelf together, and Kara pushed off with it for leverage to stand and inspect just exactly what had busied Angel in the night. His entire body crackled as he righted himself, though he felt he could manage his aches today.

Most of the broken shelves now functioned, repaired. The pile of debris in the front corner had vanished, and a variety of things which Kara recognized had been in the back room the night before now found themselves on the shelves of the store front, most notably the cartons of Halloween candy. The observation left Kara wondering what exactly his Handy had done with the back room, with the store front now so clean. He had fallen asleep with the only key to the only door that he expected to exist on the accessible floors. Even the bodies had been relocated elsewhere; perhaps Angel had used its laser to cremate them, like it had accidentally of the RadRoach.

“Ah, Sir! You’re awake.” The pale blue Handy came from the back room to take a smooth, slow swerve around the checkout counter. It greeted its owner, offering up the other half of the can of water, which he took. “I trust you slept well? You tossed a lot.”

Kara dipped two fingers in the can and used the water to rub the sleep from his eyes. Then, he dried his face on the shoulder of his sleeve and began to sip at the can to wet his mouth. He himself tried his best not to recall the details of the feverish dream he’d had the night before, but his proclivities decided otherwise, and he twitched.

“I suppose I did.” He fidgeted, and looked past his Handy as he set the can down to argue with the placement of the bobby pins that had migrated in his sleep. “You’ve been quite busy, I see. Got this place looking great. All the junk from the corner is in the back room now, isn’t it? Fantastic work.”

“I try.” Angel beamed sheepishly. “I found a third room that was almost completely all rubbish, so for now I swept it all together in the first story stock room. If that’s not to your liking, we could dispose of it somehow. I’d gladly carry it off to a dumpster for you.”

Kara walked past his Handy to observe it had completely rearranged the back room. It had restocked the entirety of useful items from the room’s metal stock shelves to the store front, and had also disinterred an open doorway Kara had not noticed last night on the hunt for the bathroom. “I’m sure the rubbish is fine for now where you put it, but what I’m more intrigued by is, you uncovered the stairs–?”

He leaned against the door frame and eyed this third room. Although there were cracks in the far wall filtering in small amounts of sunlight, he still needed the light of his Pip-Boy to see. The small lobby had a cream-colored couch with cube-shaped squat end tables to either side of it, butted up to the far wall, which beside that housed the aforementioned stairwell, with its door stuck open. To his right was a pair of elevators, and a door. The two leftmost doors both looked to require passkeys. Neither elevator looked functional, and Kara grimaced at the thought of having to get to the third floor on foot in his condition.

“I haven’t ventured to the upper stories, I’m afraid.” Angel came up behind him. “I didn’t want to abandon you, in case you had trouble with the stairs.”

The fact such a concern crossed both of them burned Kara, but he said nothing.

“What would you like for breakfast, Sir?” The Handy dug around in its back compartment. “I have some  _mutfruits_. I picked them in Sanctuary Hills to bring along. They’re packed with vitamin C. Got to stave off malnutrition and the scurvy, if you’re to be subsisting chiefly on canned meats and the like, ha-ha!”

It presented a table knife and a large, rindy, lumpy indigo produce. Its owner set aside protest to accept the fruit and utensil, and he twisted out the woody stem with trouble. “You wouldn’t happen to be able to grind those coffee beans, would you? And could I have the potato crisps with this?”

“Here you go.” The Handy offered the tube of stacked chips also. “I’m afraid not. And we haven’t come across a working percolator yet, either, I hate to remind.”

“A shame. Maybe there’s one in the break room.”

The chemist sat himself down in the wheelchair again with his meal. He started with the potatoes, needing a starchy salt fix, and washed them down with the overgrown berry. The rind was edible and only mildly pithy, but he still used the table knife to peel it back and expose the tender, clumpy meat of the fruit, and pry out its pebbly chunks. While quite watery flavor-wise, the citrus notes still made it palatable. The seeds in each ‘pebble’ annoyed him, though he could chew them up as easily as sunflower seeds. As he ate, the contemplation crossed him whether they were closer to blackberries or blueberries, or possibly even somehow distantly related to the pomegranate, with the complexity of the flesh and the types of flavors it bore. He wiped his hands with the kerchief from the pocket of his slacks, and made a face at how crunchy the thing had already gotten. Either he’d have to wash it out soon, or find a fresher one.

He stood and set off for the stairs, with the Handy coming along. The sack hood went back on.

“What say we check out the upper stories today?”

“I’ll spot you. …Is the hood entirely necessary?”

“Eleanor might still be here,” was the best he could explain.

It stayed no more than two feet behind as its owner tackled the stairs. Kara steadied himself with his cane every other step. As the two ascended, Kara looked upward arriving at the half-flight landing. The entire stairwell seemed in-tact, though he couldn’t assess whether all three stories’ lobbies had been damaged the same as the first. Navigating only by the light of his Pip-Boy all the while, the absence of any exterior light sources bolstered his optimism.

Entering the second story lobby, he found it in one piece as anticipated, though he could see in the screen-light that a crack stressed the far wall, at how the pale wainscoting and dark, peeling wallpaper buckled in. This floor’s operating lights for the elevators were lit, suggesting the lifts themselves might still work. Like the first, this lobby also had a cream couch and twin end tables. A rotund lamp had fallen off one, though the other stood, and Angel compulsively righted the errant of the pair. Next to it lay a stack of deteriorating magazines, among them medical and pharmaceutical journals, as well as a few lifestyle magazines.

Down one direction was a door, the other a hallway. He took to the hallway first, to find the bathrooms to his left, and a pair of doors to either side of the end of the hall. The left one was metal, and had a wire-reinforced glass pane; trying it, he found it locked. The one on the right had a double-action swing door, with a reminder posted on it not to bring unpurchased merchandise into the break room.

“Oh my stars,” Angel awed as the two stepped into the break room. “Look at all these appliances! I insist I cook you something fantastical for dinner, Sir.”

Kara stared intently at the coffee pot on the far counter.

“Maybe we can find the breaker box and restore power to the building. Bet with my luck, it’s behind that door with the digital lock downstairs.”

There were six tables big enough to seat four to six people each, in a two-by-three-arrangement, with a scattering of chairs and reading material. The skeletons of several employees slumped over where they’d taken their morning coffee, or outright fallen from their chairs. Owing to the dry, sour smell of the corner, Kara dared not investigate the two hundred year old contents of the refrigerator–at least, not for now. Beside it stood a Nuka-Cola machine. A blender, a toaster, a pair of hot plates, and a a toaster oven all crowded on the counter, and an industrial microwave hung from beneath the cabinetry.

The wall opposite boasted a Eat-O-Tronic machine at eye level, though when Kara glanced into the shuttered vent-style glass doors of the thing, he saw only plates of what likely at some point had been freshly prepared meals, with various impostors of meat, cheese, produce, and bread molded firmly to nearly spumescent plates. He helped himself to the Nuka-Cola machine, and sat with a Nuka Cherry. It wasn’t stealing if the company that owned it could no longer collect money, after all. Though flat and now immodestly alcoholic, he sighed with refreshment after a single swig from the iconic rocket-shaped bottle. All the classic, familiar flavors remained after two centuries. The cap ended up in his pocket, and he nursed at the beverage that had once been soda as he pulled some of the magazines on the table nearer him.

“I remember reading about these beetles.” He pointed at the article he was on, making more of a monologue than a dialogue of it. Angel was quite absorbed in assessing the kitchen space anyway. “There were compounds in their exoskeletons that could be extracted and distilled into powerful antiseptics. This piece is about using it to synthesize a salve. Some of my colleagues balked at this kind of thing. Called it folk medicine. But there were legitimate pharmaceutical claims as to the mechanism of the chem. I wonder if it ever would have found more significant applications.” He finished off the Nuke, finally feeling the headiness of the fermented cane sugar. “I’m sure they’re all extinct now.”

“I don’t know about that, Sir,” Angel replied offhandedly, arranging in the over-the-counter cabinetry all the various food supplies it had found. “I’ve encountered a great many variety of insects whilst you were in Vault 111.”

Kara simply murmured to himself in understanding. He thought a moment.

“Say, Angel. Could I root around in your storage a moment?”

“Of course, Sir. They are your things, after all.”

In addition to all the cash he’d accumulated, he also retrieved a dose of Melancholia, and he sat down under the pretense of counting his funds. He swapped out the bottle on the counter for the one he’d taken, and nursed it more greedily than he had the impromptu liquor. The two tasted so similar, aged two hundred years, though it was clear which was the headier quaff. Once it was emptied, the bottle from the opiate-and-supplement cocktail slipped into one of the nearby chairs.

Old habits die hard, they say.

Soon after, he took the Nuke bottle and closed the periodical, and approached the elevators. He went to push the call button to the left one, only to curse that it did in fact require a passkey. Of course it did. The one to the right seemed functional. It’d have to do–if it worked, anyway. He pushed the call button on it, and to his surprise the backup generator in the building still fed this machine. The speaker on the lift announced its downward descent, and he could hear the mechanisms and pulleys whirring. With a ding and the blink of a green light on the call button, the doors opened and Kara looked inside, not stepping foot inside.

Not yet. Everything about the car  _seemed_  trustworthy. He craned around to inspect the weight limit inscribed on the button panel. Three-thousand pounds. The buttons directed to the first three floors only. Surely, he could find a passkey on one of the break room employees. He cleared his throat and nudged the doors to recognize not to close on him, then he placed the empty cola bottle in the center of the short-bile beige carpet in the car. He pushed the third floor button and stepped away. Musingly, as the enameled pocket doors shut themselves, he waved goodbye to it.

“What  _are_  you doing, Sir?”

Angel had come to investigate, but Kara’s drooping, dopey eyes didn’t look away from the elevator in operation.

“Testing the integrity of the elevator.” Lyric dripped from his ineffectual tone. “I doubt it can go down to the first floor, with how bad it looked down there. But I’m sure it–” The operating light in the panel over the doors turned off. “But I’m sure it can go between the second and the third.” He pressed the call button again. When the doors opened a second time, the bottle greeted him anew, and he laughed. “Hi there.”

“Forgive me for saying so, but you weigh a far deal more than a glass cola bottle.”

“Had to see if the pulleys worked at all. Even just having this thing spruced into a dumbwaiter would be beneficial–especially if I can get that damn store room door open.” Slurring, he wagged a condemning finger at the door down the hall. “It’s an analogue lock, so it can’t be too hard.”

He tossed the cane on the couch, and pulled a bobby pin from his hair, screwdriver from his pocket in the other. Holding his tongue at varying angles as he knelt at the doorknob, he worked at picking the lock at length.

“Bingo.”

Kara pulled himself up by the doorknob, and Angel brought him his cane. The two entered the store room, lit only by the Pip-Boy display. At a passing glance, he could tell predominantly this was equipment back stock. Early on he recognized an unrusted wheelchair, though he could hardly consider it good fortune besides potentially using it to navigate the building once he could prove the elevator’s limitations.

“Shit!”

Kara grinned, and his cane clattered to the metal enamel floor as he snatched up a box.

“Sir, I understand you’re quite intoxicated, but language, please.”

“They  _do_  have orthotics! Leg braces. Wrist braces. Even a– oh  _shit_ , a surgical corset for posture control.”

“I take it this pleases you.” Angel idled a bit, unable to tell whether the cursing held genuine enthusiasm.

“Immensely.”

Kara disrobed and tried on a set of the pale canvas fabric-laced aids, while Angel wandered the room, seemingly to respect privacy. The corset came first, his most urgent price. He felt the hindsighted regret of potentially getting the laces a bit too tight in his eagerness, but the smoothness of his chest and firmness in his back comforted him in ways he hadn’t felt since Vault-Tec had stripped him of his foundation-wear. He’d inherited his great grandmother’s bust flattener by request and used it to bind his chest for nearly twenty years, though it certainly would have never had the capacity to support his spinal column in such a way as he needed now! It was difficult for him to break away from running his hands along how flat he now was, to equip himself with the other pieces. There was something so singularly soothing to know this article, unlike the flattener which the personnel had likely tossed in the incinerator, came unisex with no gender attachments.

Slowly, he began to feel like himself again. Better, even, perhaps.

The legs, upon closer inspection, were just stirrups for ankle support, but he felt even that minor of a help would benefit him–it took so much focus for him to keep himself from misstepping and putting his foot down wrong, and with these for reassurance he could put his attention to more crucial details. The wrist braces would help him stabilize his aim. As he buttoned his shirt, the lights turned on abruptly, and he squinted unpleasantly.

“Let’s shed some light on all this,” Angel prided from a far corner. “I found the auxiliary switch for this floor, Sir.”

Kara pulled up his suspenders and enthusiastically stared into space from where he sat in the floor.

“Guess I do get a hot meal tonight.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Third floor: Difficulty [Master].
> 
> Updated 2018.05.18.

That night after pairing a dinner of pan-seared Cram with a few shots of bourbon, Kara slept on the couch in the second floor lobby. He bundled up comfortably in a hospital blanket from the stock room. As much as his mind protested, he knew better than to sleep in his new braces and binding--especially not the corset. But, he reminded himself that he could simply don them fresh upon waking.

Day three at the pharmacy crowned first thing with Kara testing the elevator once more. As much as his constitution had prioritized his need to seek out the orthotics--god, sprinting down the Commons like that had felt disgusting--he knew exactly what he  _wanted_  lay on the third story. And while he had the braces on his side, he hoped that the elevator could shuttle him there reliably.

So, he located scales in the stock room. From there, he estimated he weighed just over a 110 pounds clothed, and he made Angel hover on one as well, to guarantee its thrusters’ applied pressure didn’t translate into weight. It stepped off, still confused.

“I’m not sure what this accomplishes, Sir.”

“Here, bring me a walker.”

“Surely.” It complied, and when indicated, balanced it folded up and upside-down on the scale. “Eleven pounds.”

Kara looked over to where the walkers were stored, folded up on the shelf.

“Put... ten of them in the elevator car for me, please. No, twelve.”

“I might have a misunderstanding of how these are used, if you need so many...”

“Look, they’re just the easiest unit of measurement I have handy. I don’t need a walker.”  _I don’t think, anyway..._  “I know it seems funny, but.”

Once Angel achieved the request, Kara pushed the third floor button and let the elevator travel upward. Once the light went off on the operating panel, he called the elevator back to the second floor.

“Twelve more.”

“...Yes, Sir.”

A second test proved the elevator could handle roughly a minimum 250 pounds.

“You can put them back in the stock room now.”

“As you wish.” Angel hovered back and forth with its three tentacle-limbs each loaded with four walkers at a time. “Seeing as you didn’t consider the elevator safe enough to test personally, does... whatever this was... assuage your fears of it?”

“I think I could handle riding it to the third floor, if that’s what you’re asking.” Kara stood and snatched up the last of his sweet roll, and shoved it in his mouth. He dusted off his hands in a steeling gesture, then stepped into the again-empty elevator. His grin with a cane across the car threshold kept the pocket doors from shutting. “Come with me?”

Angel rushed to cram in with its owner.

“Oh! So soon?”

“Third floor,” the elevator announced, holographic and androgynous.

With a pleased sigh, Kara exited the car with his Handy in tow. The doors shut behind them. This floor’s lobby had two armchairs and a coffee table, and some large fake potted plants. The door to the stairwell was in tact, as were the bathrooms. Like the two floors before it, this lobby still boasted both elevators. Unlike the other floors, besides access to the other floors this one only had a single heavy white wooden panel door. Before entering, he put his hood on again from his back pocket.

The chemist let himself in, and walked into what looked like a reception desk littered with paperwork, a terminal, and a keyboard. The light of his Pip-Boy scattered across the receptionist who now lay decomposed in the floor beside her office chair. Relieved to have found no ghouls, he took his hood back off, his hair mussed worse for nothing. Behind the desk stood a heavy digital security door. Squinting, Kara tried to peek in with a hand against the glass. He could see a faint green glow, but had no way of knowing if it came from a backup power source or the indicator light to something inside. He banged his fist on the glass angrily and slouched at the computer terminal with a growl.

“Fuck me. I knew the chems would be behind glass like this.” He scrutinized the terminal on the desk. “At least the terminal the door’s wired to is still working. It’s heavily encrypted, though. Could take me days, weeks, to figure it out.”

“Is it really so critical to gain access to the chem stores?” A hard pause and Kara turned his head slow to glare at his Handy. “Yes, yes, it’s certain to have some kind of medication that can help.” It knew this had nothing to do with its owner’s  _health_.

“Could you be a dear and... make me a pot of coffee, Angel? I’m going to be at this for the rest of the afternoon.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

Angel dashed off, grateful for the chance to get away before popping off sarcasm. Besides, it knew his chem stash was  _inside_  it, and if it excused itself, he couldn’t get at them.

Kara found the password was ten characters long, based on the command line which blinked at him. This newer model of RobCo terminal interfaced with Pip-Boys, to his delight: it took both holotapes and the key-prong. Eager, he rooted around the receptionist’s desk drawers for a holotape he could cannibalize. The receptionist relied heavily upon a large library of them, and she had entire dedicated file cabinet specially suited for them among the furniture of the small office. After loading a few of them to browse, he found one with only two or three entries on it, and proceeded to format it.

“Thank you, Eleanor.”

While the tape formatted, he continued rummaging the desk. Nothing looked like it could have been the cheat for the password. Before he dove into repurposing the holotape, he made sure no holotapes in the library stuck out to him, which might have been the key all along.

Kara removed his Pip-Boy and set it up on the counter. He pulled up the command screen on it and loaded the blank holotape into its cassette tray, then plugged in the key-prong to make use of the terminal’s keyboard. He still hadn’t figured out how to input data into the Pip-Boy directly, and this was a facile cop-out. By the time Angel returned, he’d gotten embroiled in composing a simple decryption tape.

“Here you go.” It set a clean mug of hot black coffee beside its owner. “Is the going as tough as you expected?”

“Not so sure yet. I’m just grateful RobCo put out any cross-compatible models before the world ended. I don’t even know if it’s possible to write anything to this Mark IV model of Pip-Boy. You remember that I clocked into the Deenwood Compound with the key-prong of my Mark III model? The thing had a holotape in it we had to guard with our lives, and plugging it into the security door loaded the data from the holotape into its terminal, which only had the key-prong and not the holotape cassette tray. Two-part key. I guess that’s how they kept people from doing what I’m doing now.” He nodded thankfully as he picked up the mug with one hand and took a testing sip. When it didn’t taste horrid, he took a second. “ _Exquisite_. It may be two hundred years old, but fresh ground coffee still tastes fresh. Angel, you still make the best coffee.”

“That means the world to hear, Sir.” Its ocular lens flitted anxiously. “What  _is_  it that you’re ‘doing now’?”

“I’m writing an algorithm that suppresses the encryption that’s censoring what each byte of data holds in it. It’s not going to crack the password for me, but it’s at least going to let me see letters instead of a billion bytes of punctuation. If I’m lucky, it’s a word and not a random set of characters.” Kara stopped a moment and counted on his fingers as he mouthed the letters. “Damn, ‘pharmacy’ is eight letters. ‘ _Pharmaceutical’_?” He shook his head.

“I’m not sure that’s wise, though I’m most impressed, Sir.”

A few more skims of the script left Kara confident enough to pop in the tape into his Pip-Boy and run it. It seemed to work, Eleanor’s screen then displaying twelve ten-letter words, interspersed with miles of ASCII symbols. He didn’t see any good guesses among them, so he tried the first on the screen:  _CIRCUMFLEX_. His script indicated the input had only two characters in common with the answer.

With so little overlap, he couldn’t readily discern a pattern; so, he tried the second word:  _JACKANAPES_. It also had two characters in common--however, his script told him one of these characters was in a different position from those of the first guess. He wasn’t a master at hacking or decryption, just good at undermining basic protocols, so the formula to putting this information to good use didn’t present itself immediately. He started scrawling notes on a piece of scrap paper, and jotted down the twelve words so he could still study them should the terminal clam up like he thought it would likely soon.

The third blind attempt-- _ACQUIESCED_ \--had yet another pair of characters in common. He wondered if any of these three pairs overlapped. Noticing the trend, he observed finally that all twelve possibilities had an ‘E’ in the ninth position, and he bit his upper lip. He scrawled a sort of Hangman at the top of his notes:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ E _

The computer let him have a fourth try, so he tried the fourth option:  _SEXUALIZED_. He laughed in frustration when this not only was wrong--the terminal locked him out for trying too many times. Yet, thanks to his decryption script, the screen displayed that the guess had four positions in common with the actual password--three which he hadn’t had prior.

As he downed his rapidly room-temperature coffee, he pored over the twelve words looking for further patterns. Six of them ended in a ‘D,’ and  _ACQUIESCED_  was the only one of those that didn’t end in ‘IZED.’ He’d already tried  _SEXUALIZED_ , so he had his next four attempts narrowed down fairly quickly once he formed a strategy. In hindsight, it would have benefited him to forge a strategy  _before_  the series of attempts.

The screen said Kara still had 34 minutes before it would let him test his theory. He sat back with a sigh, and glanced around the room with closer attention to detail. Angel had gone back downstairs. He took a smoke break and glanced down at Eleanor. Cautious, he knelt down to check her for valuables. In addition to praising she had on her person what looked like the passkey to the private elevator, he also took the silver locket around her neck. He couldn’t make out more than there being three faces between its two halves, the snippets of photography faded beyond recognition. He pocketed the passkey and jewelry, and proceeded to go through the desk for valuables now that he’d combed it initially for keys. Something felt so relatably muddy about the passing thought that the password had died with her.

“I’m about to get it, though,” he told her, “especially if it lets me try four more times.”

The time didn’t pass quickly enough, and his mind wandered again to the African beetles. He recalled folk medicine making use of all kinds of insects, for all kinds of remedies. Termites, centipedes, even grasshoppers, scorpions, and spiders. He also knew of the less reputable uses, as the vehicle of imbuing the individual with different boons... or as the source for powerful hallucinogens. A resin distilled from the finely ground powder of a particular arachnid he couldn’t recall the identity of--camel didn’t sound right--had been highly sought after in the black market, and he and Jacob had dealt with it several times. Simply named, the junkies called it  _Resin_. From his understanding, its psychotropic potency exceeded that of even psilocybin, or even Jet, and one typically heated it just enough to liquefy in order to inject it. He never sampled the stuff himself, owing to its notoriously high addition rate.

He’d had enough expensive habits to nurture.

Half of them went into cooking Melancholia. Melancholy. You are what you put in your body, right? He’d have to take stock of how much of the chem-coction Angel had left.

The Handy had left the carafe of coffee with him, and he topped off his cup. His thoughts returned to the giant cockroaches and horseflies that had infested the New England Commonwealth. He wondered if any served the same significance as the Resin scorpion?

Eleanor’s terminal let him in again at last, and he hunkered down to scrutinize his choices against the list to ensure it hadn’t shuffled them. All four of his theory-words still appeared among them and he sighed, taking one last puff off his cigarette before putting it out in Eleanor’s ashtray.  _OXYGENIZED_. Five in common, proving to Kara his theory held clout. Among the remaining three, he ruled out the unlikely  _TEXTURIZED_ , and tried  _SEQUELIZED_. When that didn’t work, power of elimination left him with  _ALCHEMIZED_.

Somehow, he’d all along had a feeling it was the right answer. He’d always thought he liked Eleanor.

After confirming the password, Kara left the door shut. He called out to Angel to see if it was within earshot, so he could report his success, but he didn’t get a response. He put his Pip-Boy back on and took his cane and his cup of coffee with him into the pharmacy lab and stock room alone.

His Pip-Boy cast a hard rim light on the equipment and shelving. To his left around the corner lay the chem lab, and to his right, the pharmaceutical stock with a dozen or so metal stock shelves. Even better than he expected, he sipped on his coffee, and took in his victory in awe. Given some acclimating, this could certainly be a veritable playground for Melancholy.

The chemist specialized in sedatives and painkilling agents. That’s what the military wanted him for: to study the applications of opiates. The more he thought about it, the more he felt the moniker fit him better than his own name, or nationalized name, ever had. He’d gone by his last name longer than he could even remember the exact point at which he’d committed to it. But to become a symbol, an avatar of the poppy? He had already, in his short time unfrozen, become something entirely otherworldly than he’d known in his past life.

Yes. Before the vault. That was a past life. Being frozen had been antiseptic in nature, and killed off the bacterial infections of compunction and reservation. This new world fostered a culture which could nourish and condition the latent aspects hidden away within himself which humanity had failed to recognize. Without time, he could tell neither if this quality was pieces of his identity to which society had been willfully oblivious, nor some vestigial proof of an embrace of atavistic progress.

But he would tap into it here. This building would be a crucible for change.

As he leaned proudly against the desk at the inventory side of the room, he felt a sharp pain in his foot, and jerked with a hiss. The mug shattered in the floor when he dropped it, and coffee splattered everywhere. He flashed his Pip-Boy this way and that because he heard the spill agitated something in here. Breathing heavy, he clutched at his cane. He wasn’t alone. Another ankle-bite jerked him to the floor, and he slid head-first backwards into the metal desk-front. With him now in the floor, the vermin revealed themselves, a dozen RadRoaches skittering eagerly toward their next meal.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Insects, insect gore, drugs ideations, and food tw's.
> 
> Updated 2018.05.26.

_Not again._

Seeking his face, the two-foot-long RadRoaches flowed up Kara’s legs. He’d contended with these insects in Vault 111 as well, and defrosting and awaking to their thinking him an intruder had punctuated the jet lag. Here, it was less a rude awakening and more a rude greeting. He should have known better. What kind of oversight to think, when he found no humans or even ghouls, that this building had no inhabitants!

He smacked the barrel of his cane over the one in the lead. Its carapace over his thigh cracked not at all unlike that of shucking a crab, and the insect generously splattered its oleous innards. Though half the vermin scattered upon this one impact, the rest dove around their fallen ally in hot pursuit of the invader’s sweet face-flesh. The light from Kara’s Pip-Boy swung about in the fray as though a dangling light bulb in a shaking building, its illumination frenzied, dizzying, and uneven. A second light source came right at him--the source of the chartreuse glow he’d observed from afar before he’d entered.

_Steady, Kara. Remember, one solid hit is all these fucks take._

Radiation imposed from the seams of this one’s exoskeleton, and he misconstrued the sputtering clicks of his Pip-Boy’s Geiger counter as threatening emanations from the enormous roaches. Kara kicked the glowing vermin in the face, and it reeled a few feet away before flying right for him along the ground. He cried out and fumbled to whack it away with the crook of his cane. Its body broke against the foot of a nearby lab desk.

A forceful hammering of his heel against the floor crushed a third, but the remaining two went for his forearms. He flinched as he shielded his face. The cane dropped to the enameled metal floor. When the RadRoaches would not relent, he laid down with his hands to his face, and stupidly hoped they would get bored if he stopped struggling. They persisted; but in falling over, he recovered enough to catch them off-guard, and he smashed both of them against the floor.

Ragged wheezing slid out of Kara as he recollected his faculties and belongings. The altercation had knocked off his glasses, and he felt around in the dimness for them and his cane. When he sat up, he winced at the deep nicks in his left forearm, left by the roaches’ blade-like mandibles. He sooner prioritized finding the breaker box for the floor than tending his injuries. Somehow, he appreciated that he’d had his sleeves rolled: for a feeble chemist, repairs of the flesh came more easily than those of fabric.

He pushed off with the cane to stand, and shambled cautiously along the walls of the room, his shaky eyes ever vigilant for the RadRoaches that had retreated. There had been twelve of them at the start, hadn’t there? Kara counted five dead. Only his dress shoes and hard rubber cane tip traversed the floor with any sound, so surely the rest must have fled.

Or, maybe he just couldn’t hear over the blood pressure surging in his ears.

Light and electricity soon returned to this floor of the building, and he turned off his Pip-Boy screen. The familiar fluorescent overhead lighting soothed him, its faint humming the lie of comfortable sterility. Now that he could see unimpeded by a windowless room, he navigated the lab readily.

He encountered two long, small confection tins on one of the lab desks and sighed in exasperated relief at the trademark label. Mentats.

“Oh, thank  _fuck_.” He groaned and slid the lid off one tin to dispense a small white seltzer-like tablet, which he promptly chewed up as he continued investigating the lab. “Maybe now I can focus.”

He’d gone two hundred years without a fix. All the chemists at both his jobs in the States had relied on them by requisite of their positions: nursing an appetent addiction to the minty chem’s boons of neurological efficiency and productivity gains came naturally to anyone in a medical manufacturing field, it seemed. Maybe he’d get lucky and put his hands on a few syringes of Daddy-O, too. Or, better yet, some barberry syrup and ethylene glycol--so he could whip up a few batches of intensely potent Berry Mentats. Albeit alarmingly experimental in perspective, the Deenwood chemists all seemed to rely upon what they all endearingly termed a  _special edition flavor_.

Everything carried a collectedness, a clarity, his mind abuzz. A sense of normality, familiarity, returned to him, standing here in a lab, standing here like this. His mind felt like his own now. For now. Kara’s gaze halted upon the wall-mounted locked glass-front gun case near the security door he’d entered.

A Syringer.

He whet dry lips and hooked his cane over his left arm, to ineffectually wipe the grime from his hands with his crusty kerchief, then worked at picking the lock with his screwdriver and one of his hairpins. It gratified him, his formed habituation of having pocketed the tool, half a two-part skeleton key. He could go and take as he pleased, provided sufficient time and patience. The kerchief hadn’t quite done the trick, so he compulsively smeared his hands along the backside of his legs to knock off further oily residue from the insects’ guts, then kept at the gun case until he had it open.

He admired the weapon in both hands as he extricated it from its place. His fingers traced along the rifle-styled copper blowgun, which most commonly utilized tranquilizers, and his eyes followed its sights down the barrel. Subduing threats often proved more effective than simply shooting them, depending on what chem piloted them in the moment. The all-too-familiar Psycho came to mind, and how security on base had relied upon Syringers to subdue without killing subjects puppeteered past their thresholds of pain, injury, and self-preservation. As predicted, he put his hands on a few boxes of Pax Syringes at the bottom lip of the case.

 _Melancholy_  would have to play with the notion of what else might be more effective--or more fun--than the Pax tranquilizer. He nearly lamented that it had not been Calmex, which evinced a low smooth enough to afford self-administration, but reminded himself the two had very different applications. His nostalgic grin washed into self-consciousness when he could hear his Handy’s thrusters approaching the lab. Angel came up beside him and eyed the rifle he still held.

“My word, what happened here?”

Kara murmured, “I intruded.”

Reminded of the carnage, he set down the rifle and rounded back to identify from which pieces of the RadRoaches he might ideally isolate useful compounds. He cracked off legs, and collected abdomens wherever they remained in tact. With the Glowing RadRoach, he also scraped together its slime into a chemistry jar and stoppered it.

“These samples will have to suffice for now. Maybe their friends will return later. They scattered like cockroaches.”

A grimy hand to his his mouth stifled a licentious chuckle.

“They certainly roughed you up. What a mess.” The Handy promptly descended upon the broken coffee cup with its housekeeping attachments, and deposited the bits of ceramic in a nearby waste bin. It looked to its owner with knowing concern, recognizing the Mentats in his tone and behavior. “Sir... You really should reconsider bringing your work home with you.”

“What can I say? It’s a calling, and its calling me?” Wryly, Kara piled up his findings on a medical tray, and placed it on the nearest lab desk. Lost in thought, he repeatedly stroked his fingertips over the scraping slices the roaches had taken out of his forearm. He raised his chewed-up forearm level to his head as he spoke next, his tone uneven but hardly composed. “I was fortunate the Pip-Boy provided me a bit of protection. Angel, would you... be a dear and... administer a Stimpak to my left arm?”

“--Certainly.”

Without hesitation, the robot produced the requested medication and took ginger hold of his wrist to press the pneumatic syringe to this antecubital fold. An astringent pleasantry, Kara spectated as his wounds healed in real time. Angel didn’t feel like the more enticing option, but still it tried:

“Could I impose upon you to take a break for dinner, Sir? It’s late, and you ought to rest up your injury. Remember, we found Yum Yums! I could use them to make you an egg salad perhaps? And I could... freshen your coffee...?”

“...Mm, I suppose pacing myself couldn’t hurt. Besides, now that I’ve got an idea of the lab’s amenities, I ought to assess what from the store room I could make use of here.” The cool derangement in his grinning eyes grazed Angel, and the robot’s ocular lenses stuttered. “Egg salad sounds exceptional.”

Jerking at the unexpected success, it flew animate and excited.

“Come join me whilst I prepare it? You can catch me up what all you’ve discovered up here, if you like. I’d love to hear what all you’re scheming!”

“Mm. You  _would_ , then, wouldn’t you.” Kara retrieved one of the tins of Mentats to take with him, then walked out into the receptionist’s office to retrieve the carafe. “Shall we?”

“--Sshall,” was the best it could muster. The Handy never had liked this side of its owner.

Kara sat in the break room with the catalog from the store front register, and pored over it with a new cup of the same coffee. One hand fidgeted with the mug, the other with the publication, and both eyes glued indifferently to the catalog.

“Say Angel, how many doses of Melancholia are left?”

“Twenty-seven, Sir. Hm!”

“Hm indeed...”

Angel added a few ingredients to the blender and puréed them. Then it poured the pale purple concoction into a tall glass, and, with the tongs which terminated one of its trio of mechanical tendrils, it presented it to its owner, who accepted the stuff in a tempered confusion.

“What say you of a  _smoothie_?”

Unperturbed by a testing sniff, Kara took a drink of it. His face scrunched a bit. Chalky, salty, heavy, and inexplicably sharp. He took a second sip anyway.

“You didn’t happen to find  _sugar_  in the pantry, did you? What  _is_  this?”

“Why, I blended a Mutfruit with one of the eggs, and a few other things I happened upon in the cabinets. Vitamins and protein in one convenient beverage! The sweetest thing we have is the sweet rolls, I’m afraid. And-- the Halloween candy! Do you think that might suit you?”

The image of intention came to mind, of adding pulverized licorices and ribbon candy to... whatever  _this_  was. The chemist narrowly kept himself from retorting  _couldn’t possibly make it taste any worse_ , instead shoving the ill-placed sarcasm into taking another big sip.  _Christ, this isn’t a smoothie_ or _an egg salad, and it’s nowhere between the two either. I didn’t program it to do this. Was this a result of deteriorating algorithms, or has it somehow learned this compulsion?_

“It’s wonderful as is, Angel. I do think I’d still like the Yum Yums themselves--an  _accoutrement_ to your fancy beverage here.”

Brutal honesty then would have merely excused unwarranted meanness and crassness. What point was there, in verbal cruelty towards a machine? His Handy was trying its best. At what, he couldn’t be certain.

Angel brought over the half-dozen carton of deviled eggs, and he opened it to pluck out one for himself. Their whites had transformed dark and translucent, their yolks now a waxy heterogeneity of ashen grey and rusty gold. He sniffed at one, and noted its pungency did not evoke the same manner of gag reflex as something which had rotted. Cautiously, he nibbled it, and, intrigued, nodded as he chewed slowly. Muskiness clung to his mouth, something like accidentally having tasted cologne. Where the other components in the smoothie previously masked this note, an attempt to wash down the bite of egg with the concoction only served to overwhelm all other flavors. He coughed, disguising his displeasure by faking food going down wrong, and chugged at his coffee.

He definitely owed Angel long-overdue repairs and firmware tweaks, and this experience underscored the need for it. He made a mental note to scrutinize to what extent he could provide such care with the extant resources on premises. At the very least, he could try to program definitions into its algorithms so it had updated knowledge on what post-apocalyptic food tasted like. Not that it could understand  _flavor_.

Kara finished the other half of the Yum Yum anyway.

He couldn’t subsist solely on Melancholia. Could he?

Appetite spoiled, again he pored over the pages boasting the company’s orthotics offerings, compared those he’d found to the variety advertised. The most basic provisions for minor infirmities and sprains. Unavailable at most locations, the sturdiest and most rigid binding Walden carried seemed nearly excessively so: fan-laced surgical orthotics. The company stocked everything from pharmacies to dementia wards. A quick thumb to the locations index designated that the hospital branch of their warehouses lay in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Constitution. Stability.  _Disposition_.

His nostrils punctuated a breath, and he cursed in Russian at his coffee under his breath.

_These braces are fine. A trek like that, on foot. It’s both excessive and out of the question._

_They’re fine._

_I’m fine._

He looked at his Pip-Boy and pretended that seeing it was after midnight had caused his irritation. He then slammed back the last third of his coffee in one go and put down the cup beside the egg carton. Mentats in hand, he shuttled himself off to the lobby couch.

“I’m turning in for the night,” he told Angel on his way out the door. “The day I’ve had is... catching up to me.”

“Rest well, Mister Kara! I’ll be sure not to disturb you.”

The Mentats went to one of the side tables with his glasses, and he sat on the couch while he struggled to remove the braces, which he set in the floor beside the couch before buttoning his shirt back up and curling up under the hospital blanket. The thorough oily coating in his mouth, and his nettled confidence, persisted throughout the night.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now supplied with overhead light, Kara investigates the stock room. Food squick tw.
> 
> (Updated 2018.05.29.)

At first, Kara thought he’d awoken to a hangover, but remembered he hadn’t had a drink the day before. He deduced dehydration when he couldn’t recall the last he’d  _drunk_  anything besides coffee. Jolting up on the lobby couch, he fretted over whether Angel had used the water reserves to make coffee the day before, or if the Handy had somehow used tap water. He squinted, too tired to speculate.

The morning ached in long stitches. He removed his dress shirt and threaded himself back into his spinal corset. In a fumble of beleaguered jerks, he adjusted the laces tight enough to his liking, then dropped his hands to either side of him. He stared out hollowly at the blown-out skeleton of the dropped ceiling at length before he even bothered with the rest of the orthotics, or even put his shirt back on. How much of the debris from downstairs had been the  _stuff_  from the dropped ceiling? By comparison, the ceiling on the second or third floors hadn’t made all that much mess. This line of thought, too, required more caffeine than he had in him.

He took his glasses and the Mentats tin and ambled into the break room. Alone, he shook the now-cold half-full percolator, but the idea of coffee turned him off for probably the first time in his life. Skimming the cabinets yielded nothing he thought might appease the intense nausea which beset him. The deteriorated, faded packages and the biting sourness of the fridge corner evinced his delusion that any preservatives in food from before his freeze would have kept them food-safe all these years. Even the Salisbury steaks felt suspect. Had any of the questionable things he’d eaten set off his stomach? Again, he worried about the unknown water source which had percolated his caffeine fix. He discarded these hindsights, and he settled on one of the three bottles of Melancholia which Angel had so graciously considered food rations in themselves. Surely, the nutritive substitute wouldn’t prove past its prime like everything else.

Like him.

Kara set the cane across a table, and sat and unscrewed the bottle. He nipped at it tiredly. After a few sips, he set it down and rubbed at his nose bridge with a grumble. Not even the syrupy horrid medicinal cherry flavor of Melancholia could wash out the sulfurous bouquet of the ‘smoothie’ which had permeated every surface of his mouth. In repeated attempt to liberate it of its increasingly rank coating, his tongue smeared against the roof of his mouth and his front teeth raked across his tongue. Irritable, he chugged the rest of the nutrient-fortified meal substitute, tossed the empty bottle in the sink, and wandered into the stock room again, flicking on the lights.

The heavy low set in as Kara paced about. Actually following dosing directions this time, he popped a Mentat under his tongue and let it dissolve sublingually. He recognized a need to meter his Mentats usage, without knowing the pharmacy’s stock. The wartime rations had affected everything, especially the public’s access to chems, and likely impacted availability even at warehouse levels. He couldn’t afford to risk profligacy with a cache of something which so readily defogged his frost-mired grey matter.

Deflated and restless, he shuffled about the stock room shelves. This time he had overhead light to facilitate skimming the overall supply at a glance, not just his Pip-Boy light. Bedpans. Gauze. Thermometers. All the saline, iodine, isopropyl alcohol, and witch hazel a medic could ask for. Needles and catgut. A variety of scissors, forceps, lances, scalpels, and the like, all rusted beyond any patent usefulness. A crate of walking canes beside the walkers. He gritted his teeth. He couldn’t use the box of Epsom salts without a place to soak, and he disowned the heartache of it by tossing the box unceremoniously back on the shelf where he’d found it.

Kara grunted as he unfolded the unrusted wheelchair to sit in it, and he hooked the cane between himself and the armrest, across the back and seat upholstery. With a few testing nudges at the chrome handrims, he resigned to tooling around the building in it for a bit.  _To try it out_ , he told himself. As he went along, he noted that walking put less strain on his upper body than wheeling himself, but he felt steadier. Compromise peddled him along by shuffling his feet. Though he still denied it, the altercation with the RadRoaches had enervated him. There would be more roaches. There always were. If he wanted to survive their next encounter, he’d have to make compromises like these. Besides, he couldn’t  _live_  in the orthotics, and until he could better determine the permanency he feared of his condition, he needed to acclimate to other modes of mobility.

The wheelchair set him on a different eye level, and he seized upon the hygiene section where it had previously eluded him. After all, he’d last bathed in 2077,  and he felt that grime to the bone. His intent stare scanned the shelves. Mouthwash. Toothbrushes. Toothpaste. Dental floss. Hairbrushes and combs. Shampoos and bar soap. Towels and washcloths.  _Toilet paper, oh lord why hadn’t he considered the horror of running out of toilet paper_. Unintelligible exasperation compelled the eager vault survivor to lay a towel across his lap and scoop a wide variety of these things into it. Holding back tears of excitement, he propelled himself to the second-floor bathroom like a deadline chased him.  Before he even got there, a gob of toothpaste and the freshly unpackaged toothbrush already churned in his mouth. The paste didn’t taste like much of anything anymore, but it still very much did the trick.

He dumped his treasures into the bathroom floor beneath the sink, and hung up the towel and a washcloth on the handrail beside the toilet. The ceramic wall-mounted sink held his gaze as he continued to scour the taste of Angel’s deviled egg smoothie from his mouth. The mirror had fallen off the wall, but the pieces no longer littered the pale tile floor as they had yesterday, owing to Angel’s compulsive cleaning habits. He turned on the faucet and the wall gave up a metallic groan before pouring out sour gold-brown water. He let it run for a while, his eyes shut in meditative comfort slowly continuing to brush. He still distrusted the water, but the unyielding need for self-care stifled any concern.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” He turned the hot water handle up to max, to let it run. “I’d get  _irradiated_?”

The stress of that permanent looming threat cracked through the froth into a weak, tickled chuckle. He expectorated, but kept brushing his tongue. Then, he noticed just how much blood he’d spat out, and stopped and watched it swirl down the sink, tongue slowly receding back into his mouth with a frown.

When the flow no longer appeared yellow from years trapped in the plumbing, he set the back of his hand beneath it. His Pip-Boy’s Geiger counter didn’t make a pip, but the faucet still ran cold. Just running the hot line demonstrated no diminished flow, so he deduced that rather than the boiler or plumbing impacting water pressure, the first floor’s breakers more likely must have fed the boiler for the building.

They’d  _have_  to excavate the first floor’s back room to survey. The building wouldn’t have a bathtub or shower, but perhaps eventually he might regain hot water without having to boil it in small batches with a hot plate. A plastic cup went under the faucet, and he swished with it a few cupfuls. The water garnered a distant contentment. Chasing it with a bit of mouthwash helped ease both the metallic flavor and his mind.

He pulled out all the bobby pins he could locate in his nest of hair, and put them in his slacks pocket. Locking the door out of habit, he disrobed and deposited his effects in the seat of the wheelchair. The first bar soap he unwrapped had gone rancid, but he opened a second to find it almost pristine. The shampoo smelled more like book paste now, but still flowed from the bottle well enough.

It wasn’t a bubble bath or an Epsom soak, and it was cold as hell, but it would have to do for now.

The soaps and such would remain in the bathroom, tucked in the floor beneath the sink. Kara sat in the wheelchair to reaffix his braces and binding, and put his glasses back on, but stopped short with his clothes and Pip-Boy in his lap. It irked him, the mess he’d made of his ensemble, but he couldn’t reasonably remedy it with just a small sink and bar soap. Surely, he could locate Abraxo venturing into town–if not in the supermarket, the high rises or their laundromat. He re-dressed and latched the bulky grey-green Pip-Boy back around his left wrist, then wandered back to the break room. He pushed the swing door open with his feet and wheeled himself inside, then shoved a chair aside to sit at a table, still drying his long, dark hair.

“Angel, a question: Did you brew the coffee yesterday with purified water, or with tap water?”

The pale blue Handy busied itself with…  _something_  in the far corner.

“Oh, Sir! Good afternoon!” It jammed the door of the fridge shut and rushed to refill the coffee cup it had cleaned when its owner had excused himself. It handed the lukewarm drink to him. “My word, though, what a question. I used the canned water! Was I not supposed to?”

“Oh, ah.” Though he knew now he could trust it, he stared into the black coffee. Somehow, the answer disappointed him. “No, it’s not that. I just realized this morning that clean water might be rarer than I thought. Coffee seems like it should stay a treat for now, unfortunately. Until we find a trustworthy water source. I need to test the water here for pathogens, but I don’t really have the tools or know-how for that.”

“If it pleases you, Sir, I might remind you that all General Atomics Mister Handies come standard issue with a network of condensators. Mine haven’t worked for some time, but perhaps were they operational again, I might… refine water for you?”

Nearly startled by the comment and its spectrum of implications, he looked up from his drink at the robot, still not having taken a sip. Of course, Angel was just as worse for wear as he was–it had operated, to his knowledge, the entire time he’d been in stasis. The condensators were nearly nonessential components of the robot, but if they’d stopped working, far more must also have. A remiss sorriness drained color from his face.

“I seem to have upset you, so let’s put that behind us for now. Forgive me for not having prepared your breakfast this morning, but you’ve told me in the past that if you had no engagements, to let you sleep… You look like you feel a thousand times improved.” Its ocular lenses flickered over him. “And… you did opt for the wheelchair, after all, I see.”

“I’m just trying it out.” Kara stiffened as he drank the stale beverage. “And yeah, a good wash does wonders, doesn’t it?” He hid gnashed teeth best he could, the stress leaching out the Melancholia from his flesh. “Say, how much bourbon have we got left?”

The Handy rummaged through its own back compartment to reach the glass bottles it had opted to keep in stow rather than shelve anywhere just yet.

“Roughly twelve ounces,” it said, eyeing the bottle once it had located it.

“Whiskey? Vodka?”

The chemist hadn’t really committed to memory the vestiges of the wet bars he’d cleaned out along the way.

“Besides the bourbon, you do have a bit of vermouth, rum, and vodka left as well. Though, I do recommend the bourbon if you intend to mix it with your coffee, Sir, since we’re without cream.”

“That’s all right. Bring me the rum, please.”

Angel obliged.

“Should we aim to restore a wet bar here? Perhaps we could locate a cache of liquor here in the ruins of Lexington, hm! Comb the high rises to lift your spirits, ha-ha!”

“Cute, Angel. …Once I’m acclimated to the building here,  _and to myself_ ,” he interjected under his breath while he poured liberally, “we’ll have to do some supply runs. Bare minimum, shoulder our way past those…  _ghouls_  into the Super Duper Mart. Hopefully, they haven’t squatted the market in large numbers.” He took a swig of the doctored caffeine and slumped in his seat. “Lord, that was terrible the other day. I’m sure they’re not just in the market, though. I’m more worried about them than I am about my constitution. We’ll have to ready up for that.”

He refrained from mentioning any desire to visit Hawthorne at the Red Rocket.

“In the mean time, I’m confident we can certainly make this place quite cozy. Do you think it feels secure enough to work towards calling it home?”

“For a while, at least.” The smooth spiciness seeped into him, and the mellow returned a bit. He held his tongue, not to complain aloud of his lack of a bathtub. “But right now, I’m going to use the afternoon to take stock of the… equity of the lab.”

“I’ll be down here, if you need me, Sir.”

Kara tossed the towel down from around his neck, tired of rubbing at his hair.

“What  _were_  you doing when I came in, anyway?”

“Oh, well! I had hoped to clean out the refrigerator, since we’ve got power in this room again.” It demonstrated the trouble by re-opening it. A thick, fine-filament mass coated every surface, and wrinkled sac-like fruits bulged from it. “It will take some time, I’m afraid, but nothing a little pluck and elbow grease can’t remedy.”

“Are those…” He wheeled up closer, and noted the pale lime glow of the fungus. His face fell slack. “…That’s brain fungus. There must have been some cross-contamination from one of the technician’s lab coats, and the spores ended up in here. Or maybe, someone stored a sample in the fridge with all the food for some godawful reason. –Doesn’t matter  _how_  it got there, really.” He sniffed, his lip curling a touch. “Good lord, were’ looking at a lot of Mentats there.”

“Does this mean the mold bears some value to you, then?”

“Utmost.”

“But the appliance is so vile, Sir.”

“So is most of the building. I’ll manage.” Kara pointed at the Handy with a firm, accusatory glare. “Do  _not_  clean out that fridge. Not before I secure another place to harvest them from. I don’t know how rare they are now, or what kind of viable stock remains upstairs. Consider it the first medication I’ve touched upon so far that has given me legitimate reprieve from my… illness.” He grabbed his coffee cup to take it with him. “Speaking of viable stock, you know where to find me.”

“I wish you luck.”

Kara stopped short of the swing door and turned back to his Handy.

“You don’t happen to remember where the antifreeze from in Sanctuary ended up, do you?”

It knew exactly what he was on about, and suddenly it lit up at the opportunity to assist however needed in his procurement of the requested chemical.

“Ah! I know right where it is. Go on ahead to the laboratory. I’ll bring it to you!”

“Thank you. You’re an angel.”

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tw's: Assault, hard drug use, drug dealing, ptsd episode.
> 
> Does Kara is allowed to have not-bad time?
> 
> (Updated 2018.05.30.)

Kara exited the elevator and glanced about the third floor lobby. The private elevator’s operating lights nagged at him. He felt in his pocket for the passkey he’d taken from Eleanor, but he did not pull it out. Though the elevator’s liminal destination nagged at him, he resigned himself to the immediate task of browsing the inventory of the lab... and, he reminded himself with a smirk, sampling as he saw fit. Surely, something in this building could help him feel better, if only in spirit.

As he entered the lab office, he found that Angel had dispatched with the secretary’s body in the same way it had the others on lower floors. He hoped the Handy had done something respectful with them all. Upon entering the lab itself, a bated breath cut out of him. The RadRoach carcasses had also vanished, along with most of the legs and abdomens he’d collected. Evident of theft rather than Angel’s cleaning habits, however--the Handy would have never lacked this level of meticulousness--the slimy streaks evident of theft trailed all over the medical tray and desk and floor, and indicated a different culprit altogether.

“Damn opportunists. Cannibals.” The chemist clicked his tongue in distaste, eyeing the stoppered bottle of ichorous goop. “At least they didn’t take the jar.”

As he browsed the shelves for anything of interest, he daydreamed of the tapestry of wasteland flora and fauna now available to him. The nuclear exchange had gifted the chance for transformation to more than just himself. He’d already encountered massive flies and roaches, and the thought of finding a scorpion similarly mutated, which might yield a resin like the one he and Hawthorne sometimes encountered trafficking chems... He shuddered in an unwholesome rigor. Too, he wondered if the poppy had survived the metamorphosis.

If not, the opioid compounds in the lab here might be the last of their kind.

A veritable cache of various household brand name chems remained among the prefabricated stock. The boxes dazzled with bright, enticing colors even two hundred years later. Tins of Mentats, bottles of Buffout and Rad-X, bags of Rad-Away, metered autoinjectors of Med-X, Stimpak syringes, and even a few ampuoles of Addictol. Albeit relieved to have extended and ready access to such amenities, Kara stopped short at the shelf upon which sat seven multi-component syringe doses of a chem to which, last he knew, civilians did not have access. His jaw tightened, and a cold sweat beaded on his brow. Though a commercialized brand label with bold, imposing red lettering now replaced the more familiar military symbol CM, beneath the trademark name the label specified:  _cyclomorphine in an army-certified, patented suspension_.

Psycho.

_“You always get so antsy around that Jahani guy at the block parties, Carey,” Hawthorne started, from where he sat at his desk. Kara reclined behind him on the bed in his grey-green pantsuit, with a magazine. “You’re both military vets. You two know each other or something?”_

_“Everbody ‘gets antsy’ around that guy,” the chemist replied, disliking the subject and not looking up from his reading. It wasn’t technically a lie: “No, I don’t_ know _him. Why?”_

 _“He’s been dogging me for months to get him something called_ Psycho _. Said it was an army thing, told me to ask around. Funny thing, he told me to ask you specifically. You might not know him, but he sure sounds like he knows you. You know anything about the stuff?”_

_Carey closed the magazine and walked into the living room to the wet bar, to pour himself a vodka and coffee liqueur. His blond thirty-some accomplice noticed the evasion, and followed him._

_“There’s three other military vets here in Sanctuary.” Carey took a sip of his drink to still his nerves. “Nate Murphy, and his wife Nora? She was in JAG Corps, and he was front line in Anchorage. And then there’s Heydar Jahani. Heydar isn’t well, Jacob. He wants that stuff because he’s in withdrawals from his service. _The Addictol stops working after a while._ I know it’s not some middle-aged stubbornness that’s keeping him from going to a doctor over it. It’s a military chem, and civilian doctors in the U.S. wouldn’t even know what it is. And he can’t tell them, yet, to _get _help, either, I imagine. Not without breaching confidentiality.”_

 _“But_ you _know what it is, right, Mindy?”_

_Carey took a bigger sip and stiffened. It always knotted him up when his partner twisted that endearment at him in anger, the desired effect. Hawthorne had timed this conversation when he knew laundry tasks would have Angel predisposed, knew he’d have Carey cornered. The chemist was going to regret it, but he already regretted everything else about this conversation. It was a struggle to keep anything from Hawthorne. Especially not when it could mean more cash in their pockets._

_“Of course I know what it is. It’s what defined my military contract. My Pharm.D thesis was on opiates. Morphine, codeine, hydrocodone. You get the idea. Psycho... cyclomorphine... is a concentrated derivative of morphine. They contracted me to weaponize it.”  
_

_Hawthorne stifled a scoff as he wandered into the kitchen._

_“Painkillers? What about the poet’s chem can be_ weaponized _?”_

_“It’s for jury-rigging juggernauts. When the power armor deployed in Anchorage gave the U.S. such a massive force boost, General Chase wanted to compensate for how limited supply the high-technology suits were, by having soldiers perform to the same level. Power armor makes a soldier stronger, hit harder, take more hits. It even has mechanisms in the legs that give them the ability to descend rapidly just by jumping off without much risk. Cyclomorphine...” He finished off the old-fashioned glass in one gulp, then refilled it. “The ‘hit harder’ part was the only part that was true with CM. It makes the user simply. Not. Care. how bad something hurts them, and they just keep going, and going. Excessive use...”  
_

_He had to sit down and drink down half the second mixed drink before he could finish._

_“Excessive use decays tissues and destroys immune system. Addicts are irascible, implacable, susceptible to septicemia. To the unaware, symptoms resemble leprosy or hemophilia.” He shot his partner a hollow glance over the top of his black cellulose crescent half-eye glasses. His defense hadn’t gained an inch. “It was my job to either further enhance its potency, or iron out its flesh-eating capacity without impacting efficacy. My commanding officer, and Chase, only cared about the former, of course. We’re too deep in this conflict with China to care about whether our soldiers come back in one piece, if at all, yes?”  
_

_Carey tried not to notice that Hawthorne had picked up a knife from the block._

_“All this time, and you didn’t just know what Psycho was–you were handling it every godforsaken day for the past ten years.” The blond chuffed darkly as he approached his partner, and he stirred Kara’s drink with the tip of the knife while sustaining smiling eye contact. “I had a feeling this was going to be a great partnership. Now, I know you return to active duty on the 25th. You’re going to bring back a case during your next leave. Or I don’t know, cook some in the back yard before you leave. Neanderthal’s quoted me five hundred a _vial.”_  
_

_“I-- can’t do that.” Carey bit his lower lip, looking behind Hawthorne hoping to find Angel return from its chore. The price boxed his ears. “I could get court-martialed if they caught me.”_

_Hawthorne grinned in total earnest._

_“Then don’t get caught.”  
_

_“You-- you don’t understand what’s at stake here, Jacob. We’re in war time. I know we just won the campaign in Alaska, but everything’s going to shit,_ fast _! They’re executing war criminals, both abroad and at home. And you’ve seen how they mow down dissenters in the streets. There’s zero tolerance to anything that even_ looks _like a conflict of interest. I know I just described what Psycho does to somebody long-term addicted to it, but you can’t grasp what it’s like with just words. I’ve seen it. First-hand. Through the trials on base.” A desperate look filled his eyes. “It rots you apart. This isn’t some street chem. The war rations aren’t what’s restricting public access to it. I can’t... I can’t in good conscience--”_

_The knife flashed up out of the glass and slashed Kara across the lower half of his face._

_“You can’t do what, now?”  
_

_Dazed, Carey clenched his chin and mouth in both hands._

_“Buddy... pal...” Hawthorne leaned in with the kitchen towel to help with the blood. Carey shrank from his warm smile, but accepted the towel. “I believe in you. You smuggle Buffout out of the pharmacy all the time for Miss Rosa. This will be no different.”  
_

_“I... I understand.”  
_

_“Attaboy.”  
_

_Hawthorne patted Carey on the cheek and let him get up to tend to the injury. But, he still followed him to the bathroom to watch from the door frame. Carey held the towel under his chin as he doused iodine down it, imprecise how much got in his mouth. Fear and pain had not wrenched tears, but hell if the astringent didn’t, and he seethed every time he poured again._

_“It’s a shame, you know, that we found out about this circumstance so close to you shipping out. Jahani told me my other option was to look into one of the big pharmacies that ship out to the police forces in the area. Something about the cops using it for riot control. I’m not about to risk our operation, approaching some cops--a cop that will sell to you is just as fast to turn on you. You could have used your position at Walden to hit up retainers at other locations. You... you’ve always been my sure bet.”_

__The Russian injected a Stimpak into his jaw and held the raw edges of the chin slice together with his fingertips, watching the mirror in disgusted resignation while it healed. The last thing he needed in that moment, in this way, was to learn was that cyclomorphine had at some point that year received paramilitary clearance._   
_

__The bombs fell before Carey had the chance to make good on the promise._ _

“...It was just... a little Mister Handy accident...”

The metallic taste returned to the roof of Kara’s mouth. He noticed he had been tracing his platysmal scar, but didn’t know for how long. The chemist shook the just-yesterday sensation from his mind. He’d assured anyone who’d asked about his scar that he intended to get Angel’s blade attachment serviced very soon, and that he still regarded General Atomics in high faith and felt completely safe. Half a truth, and half a lie.

Dealing had provided both he and Hawthorne a distraction from the mounting chaos leading up to the nuclear exchange, something to focus on besides the world quite literally falling apart around them. The way Kara saw it, hooking people up with their desired chems had the same effect for the dealer as it did for the buyer. Hawthorne had never lashed out at him like that, and Kara supposed his partner had felt betrayed in some way, or at least like Kara had held out on him. If the war strain had affected Kara, it had to have affected Hawthorne, too.

The non-branded chems seized his attention readily. Laxatives, painkillers, cough syrups, multivitamins, and the like. He never  _did_  appreciate the implacable state which accompanied Psycho’s lead-heavy low. And there was something to be said of losing one’s taste for something, after working with it for a living. Still, having it on hand ready-made would have to serve some use for synthesizing other compounds. If he could forge the stomach to handle it.

“--Barberry syrup! There we are.”

The chemist brightened significantly as he snatched up the amber bottle, throwing himself into positive developments. The liquid medication typically treated jaundice--but for many of his colleagues on base, it was part of the recipe which modified the cholinergics in Mentats into a potent nootropic with a great uptake. But, it took more than just anti-jaundice juice and some salt-licorice seltzer-tabs...

The raw components themselves resided in the half of the triangular room framed with chemistry stations. The lab desks seemed to have been in the process of a large batch of Rad-X. He balked at the irony. Skimming the bottles in these shelves, he frowned, tapping the scar on his chin.

“No ethylene glycol, though, as I expected. Where’s Angel with the antifreeze?”

He almost zipped to the elevator to check on it, but realized that somehow, and he frowned that it had already come and gone without his noticing. The red plastic bottle sat on the desk nearest the security door, as well as all the chems and medical paraphernalia they had picked up since Sanctuary. A lone bottle of Melancholia stood among the small, organized pile. It could have only intended him privacy when it noticed how detached from reality he was. He sneered at himself, likely having been misinterpreted as high rather than...  _that_.

He wished it would stop happening, whatever that was. It felt like the years he spent frozen were borrowed time, and they were being stolen back from him one episode at a time.

A huff escaped him. What mattered was that he now had all the necessary components, and he let synthesizing something for his ideal fix transfix him. Kara did not mind how late it had already gotten. He pulverized a tin’s worth of Mentats into a beaker, and set it on a hot plate as he drizzled in the antifreeze. Once the solution achieved the well-rehearsed ratio, he drizzled in the entire bottle of fluorescent yellow barberry syrup and let it boil for a few minutes. With tongs, he poured the beaker into a pill mold to cool. Not unlike fresh baked cookies, he couldn’t help but pop a still-warm tart Berry Mentat lozenge in his mouth once they were cool enough to peel from the tray.

“Just like Mother used to make.” His eyes rolled at the self-jab.

The nootropic high filled his skull with familiar static, and he smiled comfortably for a moment before the full electricity of the neurotransmitter fuel seized him. His mind frenetic with new connections between chems to which he had ready access, he welcomed the frenzy to distract him. He loaded a typewriter with halves of manila folders as he went, flipping frantically between it and a Merrick Index he found in the lab which he set beside him, to compose a storm of notes.

His flashback still twinged at him, his mind catching up to present day and marrying the memory of Hawthorne with Hawthorne now.

“-- _That could have been me_ \--”

Swallowing hard to stifle his broken voice, he reached for the ampuole of Jet. One little red ampuole of Jet, which had likely been on hold for one of their clients, now in Kara’s lungs instead. Administered from a small inhaler, the musky psychotropic compound fabricated a rife hallucination upon him while he blistered away, and the stress burst softly, like a soap bubble.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2018.06.12.
> 
> NSFW. Tons of TWs: Insects, drug use, drug-based gore, hallucinations, dysphoria, parasites, and descriptions of decomposition. Deeply erotic undertone.
> 
> ...'Choly finally agrees with himself that he's 'Choly. He had a good time or something I guess

Kara parted his rheum-encrusted eyes with a groan, and sat up in the wheelchair. The Russian set his glasses on the desk. When he rubbed at the indentations the typewriter keys left in his cheek, he left dark, absent smudges across his face from wiping away the sticky gound. He had trifled with the near-fossilized ink ribbon, based on the results of the papers he’d defaced. He could tell, too, that he had not successfully jogged the original ink to flow again; instead, the brain drugs had determined means to introduce…  _something_ , earthy and repulsive, which proffered the spool case some substitute. Whatever the medium, the ichor had dripped, splattered, and smeared all over the desk, the papers, the typewriter, and even Kara himself. With a dismissive lip curl, he removed from the typewriter the scrap of paperboard which the improvised muck had nearly glued into its carriage. He noticed the unsightly sigil of smeared fingerprints on the desktop, but didn’t bother to speculate.

A raw but detached ache locked up the chemist’s anatomy, especially his upper legs for whatever reason. Owing to the storm of composition he’d undertaken while throttled, he’d have sooner guessed an arthritic flare would have allotted his hands the brunt of displeasure. As he stretched and ran one palm along his front and extended the other overhead, noticing the rigid flatness burbled a groan from him: he’d passed out in his binding. No wonder everything hurt. Yet, poring over what he’d poured through the typewriter superseded any priority of physical forms of self-care, the more he realized the significance of what he’d transcribed.

The fugue of Mentats and Jet had woven his thoughts across the clutter of ripped manila file folders, wads of ancient continuous stock paper at different lengths, and the inner side of laid-flat empty chem cartons. In a mixture of pencil and pencil-dipped-in-muck, he’d handwritten both calculations too complex for a daisy wheel and diagrams as to procedure and proposed methodology of administration. Though sprawled out across the desk, the compilation appeared generally attributable to three concepts, each pile sloppier and more possessed than the last. He recalled no especial prior affinity for an ergolinic high, but the opportunity in availability had clearly provided him prodigious productivity of  _some_  kind. This undertaking could not realistically bestow a sense of normality, as he’d hoped at its inception, but perhaps he could take something constructive from at least one of these leaves.

The bated optimism of advanced chemistry formulas and syntheses led off the opus. Theoretical pharmaceuticals appealed to his vocational habituations, dabbling somewhere between compounding together two chems to interplay their effects in a single dose, and outright combining chems to synthesize an entirely new one with the properties of both.

How to synthesize Psycho from scratch, provided raw components. A rote memory, even now, though transcribed for reference’s sake. One reduces the alkaloid morphine through application of a mercaptan, and an epoxy-like three-part injection then mitigates the resultant precipitates wired into a vehicular Stimpak which also functions to curtail tissue deterioration at the injection site. A ratio of paint thinner, acid, and liquid fertilizer would also do the trick, where thiolated salt eludes the chemist in a pinch. Were it not for the other ‘recipes’ punched out here in text, Kara would have favored keeping the morphine pure… and keeping it for himself. Just because he knew how to manipulate alkaloids didn’t mean he had any personal use to.

How to combine Buffout and Psycho. Stimulating endorphins in excess of cyclomorphine provided a strong hypothesis as to how to enhance the brute force bestowed by the opiate agent–yet here, he had postulated the capacity to induce the hormone center of the brain to uptake the opioid. Though the compounded chem’s risks remained analogous to plain cyclomorphine on paper, the introduction of Buffout’s steroidal elements in a ‘Psycho-Buff’ foreshadowed a likelihood of excessively thinning the individual’s blood and straining the heart once the effects faded, despite the initial bolstering of fortitude and staying power. Something in the back of his mind suggested that this recipe, or something like it, had once posited a potential solution to his military contract, though his work history dragged along through the dense fog of his memory. Regardless, the possibility of long-term hormone imbalances and teratogenic pituitary complications nettled a squirm out of him.

How to combine Jet and Psycho. An unusual and unknown venture within pharmacology, the compound would utilize opiate receptors as its route of uptake, to harness the reflexes of the individual, and discard hardwired iterative limitations. As he read the entry, he formed a relieved appreciation that the hit of Jet that had composed this monstrous work might have been one of the last in the country. Jet, distilled from the manure of cows mutated by an improperly disposed agricultural hazardous waste, had stayed in a niche subculture use not at all unlike the lysergic acid of the Twentieth Century, though Kara had always argued with colleagues that it would have great marketability and usefulness to shell-shocked veterans. If the hallucinogenic properties of the ergoline inhalant remained in the compound, as he speculated, an individual under such an influence would present both momentous force and dearth of direction from outside sources. The mere imagination of ‘Psycho-Jet’ in use got him grimacing, and he praised the likelihood the apocalypse had eradicated cows of all kinds, if not solely to prevent such a thing from ever existing.

How to combine  _Mentats_  and Psycho. The most appealing of this first chapter of annotations, as far as what Kara might himself sample, though he doubted he’d partake in even this specimen, either. The fusion of these two compounds would, like the Psycho-Jet, reroute cholinergic stimulus through opiate receptors; as a result, if he understood his figures correctly, ‘Psycho-Tats’ would only bestow enhanced senses, rather than the comprehension and critical thinking boosts which Kara prioritized from Mentats themselves. Ideally, if cholinergic doping did not hyper-stimulate the nervous system to boost perception, it could at least compensate for the irrationality of the opiate itself. Yet, while the cyclomorphine benefited from enhanced perception, the compound risked an unknown severity or duration of migraines in the same stroke.

Despite his prior distaste for partaking in cyclomorphine personally, he still presumed ‘Kara on Jet and Berries’ believed he could market it and its relatives in the post-apocalyptic tapestry, thus necessitating this alter ego’s authorship of such an addendum to the Merrick Index. The less desirable side effects of all of these were just as much speculation as their benefits, without sufficient testing. For a moment, he admired the entrepreneurial vision of ‘Kara on Jet and Berries,’ despite how thoroughly the homebrew cholinergic had so obviously skewed his moral compunction.  _Pharm Corps Captain Alan Carey, of the Deenwood Unit of the Chemical Corps of the United States Army, would have_ never _seen merit in extending cyclomorphine for recreational purposes._ Yet, as he read on, his brow flattened into a hard squint. The point at which the Jet had choked ‘Kara on Berries’ manifested clearly, not just in topic but in mode of transcription. The chemist who’d drafted this initial stack had been ‘Kara on Berries,’  _not_  ‘Kara on Jet and Berries.’

In the second movement of the fugue, an inventive but deranged ‘Berry and Jet Kara’ explored several possibilities of utilizing CM in the syringer rifle he’d found. He whet his lips and squirmed. Such sensibilities suited the chemist far better than mere bullets. He’d never liked the idea of killing or injuring another, and just as much never liked the idea of putting CM into his own body. It really appealed to him, to weaponize CM in ways which didn’t immediately imperil allies. 

What demarcated the narrative shift between the first and second Karas most significantly was his realization many diagrams bore footnotes which did not refer to any such sections on paper: ‘Kara on Jet and Berries’ had, by volume, transcribed directly into the Pip-Boy. This mode of Kara had determined that the Pip-Boy 3000 Mark IV had integrated into its padded cuff the Nostrus glove function he’d known of the Mark III model, eliminating the necessity for an intricately wired glove with sensors which tracked the motion of wrist tendons. Finally, he was learning how to use the damned thing.

Berserk Syringes. Within the repulsive aspects of potential implementations of Psycho-Jet lay a fertile opportunity to frenzy an enemy into taking out their own ranks. Let the enemy sort itself out. The option of sacrificing one’s own allies to CM appealed less in every way than this answer, save the possibility an enemy doped with one of these syringes might survive attacking all their own and left the home team contending with a juggernaut. Increasing blood-alcohol level rather than relying on a psychotropic high yielded a dual compromise, as it would double as a blood thinner and prove infinitely more cost-effective in any sizable batch. That, and an angry drunkard could often do just as much damage as an angry addict. Omitting the rot-suppressing Stimpak would help, too.

Bloatfly Syringes. Kara struggled to still himself, beginning to underpin in places the hallucinations that had fueled this particular entry. When he encountered them in Sanctuary Hills, these massive flies had jettisoned their maggots at him, likely intending he host their gestation. He rubbed and scratched at a phantom twinge along his left forearm as he scrutinized the diagram of the test-tube ammunition mock-up, and he sniffed in rictus. This ammunition could aid the larvae in finding hosts. Using cyclomorphine would not only numb the injection site and obscure the parasite from the victim, but, lacking the Stimpak component of classic CM, it would also putrefy the tissues surrounding it thus rendering an easier feast. Provided the opiate precipitate did not similarly affect the insects, agitating them at best, he could impart ‘maggot therapy’ upon those he deemed worthy of it. If given sufficient time to fully mature, the neonate bloatfly–or bloatflies, he insisted–might upon emerging follow onward in kind with other victims nearby.

The chemist wondered if bloatfly maggots matured even faster than their ancestors, noting the enormity of the things now by comparison. Something crawled within him, to read the passage of notes postulating farming maggots indefinitely in this way and for this purpose. It was then that he caught himself rubbing and scratching at the insides of his legs in the same way he’d done of his arm. His bottom lip puckered between his teeth, unnerved by the fact the Nostrus stenography had inadvertently annotated even these brief strokes. Where before they had merely pockmarked the syringe entries and he’d presumed them simple typos, erratic strings of garbled punctuation dragged through the entire bloatfly passage like discordant slurs and ties.

Rightfully, he scared himself sometimes. The next chapter of the opus could only embody his penchants in this way, and he waded titillated through prose encrypted by his own delirium.

The third movement seemed wholly penned by ‘Jet Kara.’ Any remnant of ‘Berry Kara’ had fallen asleep by now, no co-author to the work of fiction which proceeded. Now, an entirely more ribald, impenitent, and purpureous creature piloted this manuscript than the Kara who came before him. What of compunction, when prose conjuncts the voyeur to the subject? Many of the disarrayed pages found themselves manifest upon surfaces more improvised than before, the shapes and colors of deteriorated paperboard cartons, rent flat, lending an added splash of delirium. The typewriter had been shoved away in favor of desktop surface work-space, and 'Jet Kara’ had either handwritten his unit, or rightly mashed it into the Pip-Boy. Not only had he run out of respectable sources of paper upon which to impart his masterpiece, it had spilled outside such margins.

The night’s writing fugue rode earlier melodies and interwove them from technical science into pure, hysteric fiction. But, the compilation, where legible, presented a rapt aphorism: Did he any longer  _need_  to separate the two? Fantasy could become reality, should he desire it. Who would stop him, save himself?

The Jet-emblazoned chemist had adopted in earnest the  _nom à clef_  ‘Melancholy’ to pen a short story entitled “Flyblown”: in minutiae, complete with scrawling, messy illustrations, a fictional autobiographical account of self-administering the hypothetical Bloatfly Syringe to his lower groin. Having utilized a standard CM syringe, rather than only cyclomorphine as his predecessor had posited, the Stimpak component had grafted the maggot to him.

At first, the affixed grub resembled the figure of anatomy of which Melancholy felt birth had deprived him, and he admired it as such, tender and diligent. The nascent organ hungrily shaved small bites from the insides of his legs as he slept. Even this element of its identity endeared Melancholy to it. He permitted its nocturnal feeding unremitted, and consequently dreamed feverishly of its gorging itself upon his flesh. Additional painkillers beyond the initial administration would be a sin: he needed to feel its every twinge, every mouthful it extracted. It hungered to cleanse his decaying body. During waking hours, the routine of changing the dressing which managed his thighs’ cutaneous weeping harbored the merits and charm of some arcane ritualism. He left off the gauze at night, not to let the wounds air, but to give the organ free rein.

The organ molted in entirety with each subsequent progression of instar phase, thus distending ever larger and more grotesque. Another element to the ritual, Melancholy found himself saving whatever remnants of the organ’s metamorphoses he encountered, to amass a rancid reliquary in honor of its achievements. Slowly, certainly, he was realizing the reality he’d become a ghoul, undead, shambling, difficult–but the larva mitigated.

By the third instar, he could not wear trousers as before, and girded the inertia of the organ with further implementation of dressing. He no longer thought of leaving the pharmacy, not out of shame but obsession, as he could feel both the organ’s pulse and respiration resonate through his groin from its base–the Stimpak had fused its flesh with his own, making himself the larva, and the larva, him. The organ sprouted coarse, hollow hairs, which Melancholy admired and oft petted. His purulent legs transitioned from seeping clear fluid to outright bleeding as the days transpired, and by the organ’s fourth instar, its appetite to purge him of seemingly endless rot had excoriated enough of his thighs that he could no longer stand, helpless to contain his autolysis.

The chemist trembled, to read Melancholy’s description that the organ seemed paradoxically trapped in a procession of instar phases: fusion to his flesh had either robbed it of its ability to transform into a Bloatfly proper, or had bestowed upon him the ability to eventually transform into a Bloatfly himself. By the abrupt end of the narrative, the organ had bloated to the size of what had once been an upper leg. Hunched over the desktop as he read, his fingertips had already long since dug deep bruises along the insides of his thighs in aching want of the thing, but the rawness wasn’t what rent his breathing ragged. Scrambled in a soup of erotic short-circuitry as the Nostrus had penned his very jerks and strokes, Melancholy’s final hindsight was dual. One, he pined to know the ultimate fate of the organ, and what form he might fuel from the experiment. And two, he had neglected to administer multiple syringes at once–if any of him remained upon the organ’s reemergence, he must somehow rectify this mistake for the second take.

_Clkclkclkclkclkclkclkclkck-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-kk-ck–_

Nervous tugging with the edge of his middle fingernail against the inseam of his slacks had yielded another vibrato-addition to the incoherent slurry: a mile-long string of wriggling commas. Shaking, he checked and double-checked that the document had been saved to the holotape in his Pip-Boy. He felt as though cleaning these strings from the masterpiece would belie the spirit of the thing, so he left in tact the unique mixture of onomatopoeia and synecdoche representative of his inhibitions.

“ _–That could have been me_.”

The memory of Hawthorne’s rotten, misshapen face tormented him with nostalgic jealousy. Too fatigued to curse at himself for the nightmarish composition, he stared, haunted, at his now-reviewed compendium as he steadied his breathing. No influence of chems had enabled his understanding of what he’d read; and yet, in that moment, the entire thing  _penned by chems_  made genuine sense, like a depth charge dredging epiphanical clarity from beneath an otherwise debilitating mental fog.

He wondered if ‘Jet Kara’ would ever make a repeat appearance in his literature. But, ‘Jet Kara’ could live on in observance of his  _becoming_  Melancholy.

Melancholy could be him. He could be  _Melancholy_.

How long since his emergence from his bicentennial pupal stasis? What form might  _he_  adopt? No other nymphs save himself had survived the cocoons of Vault 111, it seemed, if he could even term it having survived. Provided no other vaults’ nymphs had survived, the responsibility fell upon him to carry the morality of the insect into the Wasteland.

A great deal of work lay ahead, before Melancholy could do mission work for his nascent ideology in the wasteland. Thus, he left his notes at the lab desk and retrieved his glasses. He’d later preserve his masterpiece in the false bottom of his Mr. Handy’s storage compartment, but for now he wheeled off seeking the robot’s doting attentions. Brushed up on his politic, he finally felt awake.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are starting to pick up, I suppose.

Melancholy set down his coffee cup, and swallowed while he continued fidgeting with his Pipboy. Thus far nothing had spurred him to really acquaint himself with the nuances of its dials and buttons, and he sat there in the pharmacy break room skimming the lead-yellow, wrist-bound instrument’s menus in half-boredom, half-interest. The calibration of its global positioning system seemed reliable, as he presumed of its itemized annotation of the user’s vital statistics. The wrist-cuff padding contained sensitive diagnostic features which monitored the user’s vitals. Neither of these preliminary tabs of the menu seemed pertinent before. He knew his way to Concord and Lexington from Sanctuary, even on foot, and he felt more and more like the Pipboy would never correctly diagnose his critical condition from what limited scope of statistics it could scan.

 _There is no medical precedent for what is happening to you, Mister Kara,_  he told himself with a wry disinterest.  _I simply know you’re falling apart._

The third story bathrooms still had one in-tact mirror, the only left in the place he’d found yet. One page in the health section listed diagnostic returns of features he’d already learned of in this way: the device could not pinpoint what had oddly cataracted his hazel eyes, a shock of white now streaked his greying hair, and vitiligo mottled his jawline and various parts of his right and back sides where cryogenesis had, in its own way, frostbitten him. Another sub-menu in the health tab piqued his brow a moment: in the few weeks he’d worn the device, it had already inferred a rather detailed itinerary of his core proficiency and skills. On yet another sub-menu, the Pipboy let him know it knew of all the addictions he’d racked up in the same few weeks. He flipped tabs with a grunt, and bit his lower lip.

Since it seemed at first glance they required access to a terminal port for keyboard entry in order to be most useful, he skipped over tabs which looked useful for maintaining inventory invoices and for organizing correspondences. The last tab on the menu list queued up a series of local radio signals the Pipboy could pick up, and 'Choly’s hollowed eyes glazed. He set down his glasses on the table to look it over. Surely, these couldn’t be sophisticated radio stations. How could such things be maintained with the landscape as it had become? Dubious, he flicked the dial down to one whose frequency had been clearly labeled, and selected it: “Diamond City Radio.”

_♫ ...and I wonder why everything's the same as it was. I can't understand. No, I can't understand how life goes on the way it does... ♫_

“What kind of--” The chemist hushed himself and glared at his Pipboy as he recognized the song in disbelief. “Don’t they know... it’s the end... of the world...”

“Ah! You found some music to fill the place!” Angel stopped its skimming the cabinets to brainstorm meal plans, and came over when it heard its owner whispering along. “The tune’s a bit drab, though, don’t you think?”

The deejay came on, broken and awkward.

“Coming to you from. Ah. The jeweled green... I mean the green, the, ah, Great Green Jewel of the Commonwealth. It's... Diamond City Radio. That was Skeeter Davis. A name I still find confusing. Was I. Ah. The only one surprised that Skeeter Davis is, you know... a woman? Just. Aah. Didn't really sound like a woman's name. Ah-- anyway! Here's a real classic from good old Nat King Cole... ‘Orange Colored Sky.’ It's. It's a good one!”

“Great Green Jewel,” 'Choly repeated as the next song aired. “I wonder if this is just a recorded radio personality, or.”

“Only one way to find out, hm? Where is this Diamond City he mentioned?”

“Someplace in Boston, I’d imagine. I don’t know anyplace that was named that  _before_  the bombs fell.” 'Choly took another sip of his coffee and gave his Handy-bot earnest eye contact with its triplicate visual sensors. “Guessing we’ll have to work on becoming road ready sooner than later. It’s just dawned on me--General Atomics was working on cross-compatibility with RobCo in the years leading up to the nuclear exchange. I know the old model struggled with it, but this newer one I nicked in the vault seems capable. Let’s head into the stock room and see if we can’t interface you with my Pipboy. Update your hydraulics calibration, too. You’re far beyond overdue for maintenance, my friend.”

“Stars and garters, yes.” Angel caught up in itself. “Pardon the animation. I’ve simply... been unable to tend to my own upkeep all this time, and--”

“Hey, now,” the chemist grinned, putting his glasses back on. “You remember, don’t you, how much better I felt once I got to bathe after being frozen two hundred years? It’s your turn.”

“I-- Thank you, Sir.”

The tune of Mercer and the Pied Pipers' ‘Personality’ followed them to the next room over.

♫  _...Certain things, like sable coats and wedding rings...? ♫_

\+ + + + + + + + + +

_♫ --The world’s gone mad today, and good’s bad today-- ♫_

Like the consequence of a defibrillator, the building drew its first rasps in centuries. While the chemist had spent most of the last two weeks in an unreal soup of chems, the Handy-bot had spent the same time disinterring the back room in the first story, motivated by its recent repairs and recalibrations. Too, the second elevator’s doors on the first story appeared from behind the rubble, though like the other elevator, damage from the neighboring building’s collapse trapped it from access. Angel had shepherded its owner to do the honors, in the optimism that the effort could reinstate full electrical current to the structure. Though many lights and electronics no longer functioned from the combination of nuclear damage and centuries of disrepair, many others previously unaffected by the other floors’ breaker boxes still sprang up and brightened.

A coughing fit overtook him as the air ducts billowed bicentennial dust. The lower half of his face shied into the collar of his dress shirt.

_♫ --Just think of those shocks you've got, ♫  
♫ and those knocks you've got-- ♫_

“–Maybe this was a bad idea.”

_♫ --and those blues you've got, ♫  
♫ from those news you've got-- ♫_

“Oh, Sir! Coming right away.” Porting the tangle of bed straps its owner had tied all over it the week before, Angel rounded up behind the awkward cane-synecdoche which ascended the stairwell. “Wouldn’t you rather make use of the harness you outfitted on me? Be careful!”

 _♫ --and those pains you've got, ♫_  
♫ if any brains you've got ♫  
♫ from those little radios-- ♫

The Russian-American had had enough of the Pipboy’s peanut gallery in the moment, and nearly punched it to turn it off. Evacuation to the second story yielded no better ventilation, and ‘Choly reclaimed the wheelchair as he took the elevator to the third story. Anxiety crawled up his body as he recognized the sounds of things inside the walls also stirring afresh. Reality had an unpleasant, rippling echo that late afternoon. Where could he find respite until the air system had evened out?  _Would_  the ancient filters yield results? He couldn’t open windows on a building with none. A flurry of draughty haloes refracted his path.

Among these dust-borne glories, he saw the operating light on the other elevator. Testing its soundness would take too long, and he didn’t know how far he could climb the stairs, either by their failing form or his failing function--he had outfitted Angel with the harness so he could ride it, but he hadn’t really practiced balancing on its back in this way, and the thought of urgency necessitating test runs only made his blood heave through his veins harder. He bit his upper lip and squirmed, throat and eyes burning, while he awaited the call button to retrieve the car.

“We left everything out in the kitchen. Dinner is ruined, though I’m sure you might have guessed that.”

“– _Least of my worries right now_ –”

Another coughing fit silenced ‘Choly from voicing his irritation, from having tried to talk. He ground his teeth from inside his shirt and rushed inside, Angel following while he depressed the 'close doors’ button with a rapid desperation. Once shut in, he noticed cleaner air, albeit stale. He wheezed and inspected the operating panel. The elevator could no longer arrive at the first floor, but it could in theory go to the fourth through eighth. It seemed both elevators evaded the dust onslaught. Yet. Maybe…

“Are we to remain in the carriage, Sir? We can have a slumber party! Ha-ha!”

“No. We can’t just stay in here indefinitely.” As he caught his breath, he steeled himself with a sublingual Mentat from his pocket. “What all is still in your storage compartment?”

“Well!” the pale Handy replied in thought, rooting around behind inside itself, “I have your pistols and munitions. Seventy-three 10mm rounds, and twenty-six .38 rounds. A box of deviled eggs and a can of water. Your jumpsuit from the vault. Oh, and that odd cowl you took from that lass in Concord. We can stay in here a  _little_  longer, though, right Miss Sir?”

'Choly’s jaw tightened as he stared past the elevator’s wainscoting. He loathed the very notion of donning the vault suit again, even with what few foundations he now had. Paired with Angel’s verbiage glitch, he flinched at the notion, but he loathed even more the idea of staying longer than necessary inside an elevator, especially one of untested reliability.

The chemist leaned forward, and sweated pressing the button for the fourth floor. The elevator’s winch mechanisms groaned but hoisted smoothly otherwise.

“Give me the water. …And the hood.”

Angel complied, and the indicator panel announced their fourth floor arrival with a holographic voice and a bell-ding. ‘Choly panicked when the doors opened, and, frantic, he lunged at the ‘close doors’ button again. He sat, breathing heavy, with the items in his lap. The panic of having to  _evacuate_  was blooming into a recurrent theme. To the vault, as the sky threatened to fall. From the vault, as its artificial intelligence warned of impending loss of life-sustaining operations. And now, from the new home he’d begun to fashion for himself. He chastised himself for likening kicking up all this dust to the former situations which had genuinely threatened his life. Still, his head and heart throbbed, shooting pain down his left arm, and he was convinced the only way to quiet himself would be to step foot outside.

“Is… everything all right, Sir?”

The chemist motioned for his Handy-bot to can-open the water for him, and with it he doused the canvas sack hood. Moisture served to enhance its ability to block airborne particulates. He slipped it on and tucked the open can in the back corner of his wheelchair seat, under the cane beside him. The Mentats told him he had bounded upward rather than outward, and his face flushed at the mistake made in his state of alarm, but he did his best to reassure himself that entering the streets of Lexington at night stood to endanger him far worse than some musty air.

“We’re going to be fine,” he lied. “I need the 10mm. And the bullets for it.” It complied, though hesitant. “I’m just grateful there’s no apparent gas leak, Angel. Your thruster would have blown us up.”

“Silver linings, I suppose.” It failed to conceal worry in its intonation.

Melancholy opened the elevator and wheeled out to find a hall to either side rather than a lobby. Damaged fluorescent lighting flickered, and he could see several doors to either side of the elevator, as well as two across from it. Office floors, as he had predicted weeks ago. Having soaked the hood made breathing a heavier ordeal, but the barrier of moisture did as intended. Only one elevator accessed these floors, he noted, as he rolled to each end of the hall. The lone door to the left of the elevator provided access to the roof, it boasted. A breath choked him as he struggled to open the interior door, then the exterior. Angel helped once it grasped the desired effect.

Upon rolling out onto the rough paved roof and into the night air, Melancholy’s jaw slackened. Though the building tucked itself beneath the shadow of a multi-level overpass, across the way lay the Corvega assembly plant. The automotive facility’s iconic saturnesque globe and multitude of smokestacks still boasted to illuminate Lexington’s ruined cityscape. He squinted upward to see that he’d connected enough circuits within the wiring of the Walden Drugs’ pharmacy to light up the billboard sign at the top of it, as well as the sign at the front corner of its lower stories.

He sat back in his chair and caught his breath. Removing the hood, he allowed himself a dry, broken chuckle, and he quaffed at the can of water from beside him. Thoughts lost him as the stress slowly melted, but the sound of quiet commotion garnered his attention. When he looked up, he found humanoid silhouettes on the rooftop of the plant. Adjusting his glasses, he returned their gawking.

“Might we… return inside, Sir? Seems our refurbishment efforts have garnered some unwanted attention.”

“Hey, now. I don’t know if it’s  _unwanted_  yet. They might be different from those asses in Concord.”

“BRILLIANT,” one of them yelled sarcastically.

“–I,” he set his water between his knees and cupped his hands to his mouth, “THANKS.”

The group that had gathered gave him an unanimous chuckle, and he smirked to himself a bit.

“I think we’ll have dinner on the roof tonight,” he told Angel, as he turned the radio back on at low volume. The mellow, jazzy brass of [Val Bennett’s 'Soul Survivor'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaLcoydcf54) greeted him, and he melted into his chair a bit with a smile. “Pass over those Yum Yums.”


	12. Chapter 12

Hours later, the chemist returned inside to find the dust had settled enough to tolerate. In the following days, he readied his stock and with exuberance set to preparing a buffet of both useful and marketable chems. While Angel busied itself investigating the newly accessible administrative offices, ‘Choly tended not to pay much mind to any of it, except to take stock of the cash office and the executive suite’s wet bar. Despite the amenities of the executive suite, due to it being the top story it had sustained poor weathering, and the most comfortable living space remained the floor with the break room. But, ‘Choly had a potential market staked out here in Lexington, and that source of income superseded any potential disappointment he might have experienced over the absence of any immediate lavish furnishings. The habit of accumulating funds was diehard as ever in the absence of other means of stability, and the familiarity of falling back into pharmacology nursed it readily.

Both therapy and information came from taking his work breaks on the balcony-roof. In daylight, he could see these raiders neighbored him to three sides: behind him to the South at the Corvega plant, and to the West and North across the street a collapsing network of high-rise apartments. The re-coolant and bus station still to his East remained lifeless at a glance. The raiders, all around him, seemed wholly more civil to him than those which had overtaken Concord. None had, after all, taken a shot at him yet, and they hadn’t to his knowledge tried to break into the pharmacy. He speculated that, perhaps, they’d freshly conquered Concord, and that their laxity here in Lexington sprang from their ability to sprawl out comfortably in the urban canopy, away from the feral ghouls wandering at street level.

He wondered if the Concord raiders belonged to this larger outfit. Part of him definitely thought so, but another greater whole of him believed most citizens of this wasteland now behaved in such a way, embracing a freedom from performative expectations. Human nature contained within it the capacity to uphold the ideals of creative anarchy. He could respect it.

Melancholy set himself on a chem break after a successful batch of Calmex: a veterinary sedative related to ketamine which, used on humans at key dosages, shuts off certain pieces of the brain to proffer sum function to the rest. The chemist had favored the commonplace tranquilizer for recreation before the war. Up until the final year before the bomb exchange, Calmex had found no respected use as anything besides cost-effective sedation for battlefield surgery, rather than its capacity for steeling snipers’ precision and readiness to shoot. Who knows who gave a fresh surgery patient a gun before the sedative trance had wholly worn off; maybe, a soldier’s commanding officer grew too impatient, and rushed her off back into the fray prematurely. With the war efforts more focused on offense rather than medical recovery, the chem rations had prior rarely impacted how freely the sedative flowed--but that changed upon the discovery of its weaponizable function, and it dried up just like everything else the military had a purpose for.

Grateful for the harness-compatible dart cases he’d located in the pharmaceutical stockroom, along with a variety of other syringer paraphernalia, he’d affixed them to his suspenders with affection, and outfitted each case with different injectable substances: some explicitly for personal use, the rest to dote upon others. The Calmex fell among the former. If this trial run went smoothly, he’d have to branch out his product line among the latter.

He whet his lips. As he sat on the pharmacy roof with the syringer rifle in his lap, Melancholy helped himself to a Calmex dart and rubbed vacantly at his antecubital fold after administering it. Coming up here like this, he sought to treat his new acquaintances. Advertisement, he told himself. He loaded the pneumatic dart gun’s magazine with a bottle of Buffout he’d that morning laced out into darts via epinephrine. In the past ‘Choly had always used Calmex to disengage his mind from his body, but here he would test for himself its ability to interface them in ways only nature could have intended. The chem seemed not only to steady his aim and improve his vision, but it also dulled his compunction just as much as it did his sensation. He squinted through the sight, and popped a dart at the nearest raider on the roof of Corvega.

A commotion ensued when the dart stuck the raider in the neck. He brushed away the offending trinket like a swatted insect and whirled around to locate the source of the sting. When he realized he Felt Pretty Good, he stopped making a big deal out of it and stared squarely at the wheelchair-bound dreg in a sack hood. A buddy in a mixture of hurricane fence and tatters shuffled up to him and she shoved him in the shoulder, and he pointed at Melancholy and probably told her that the dreg had shot him with  _something_.

'Choly popped off another dart, this time into the buddy of the first. She, too, flustered in the moment, but paused when no apparent harm came of it, and proceeded to shove her pal again. The roughhousing resulted in the guy getting knocked on his butt the second time, and she looked to her hands and tittered. She hoisted him up over her shoulder mockingly and slipped away with him, and soon more raiders appeared with her and filed up at the edge of the plant’s roof with their expecting arms out in welcome.

“Like shooting skeet.”

He chuckled to himself, taking aim again and going down the line. After he had them all juiced and rowdy, he shot the last round in the pneumatic gun into the butt of one of them. She jumped and grabbed the thing, to find it had neither chems in it nor functioning administration mechanisms. Instead she pulled from it a scroll of paper. Inspecting it, she showed it to the others.  _Free Samples: Buffout._ The chemist had hoped at least one of them were literate--at least, English literate. He doubted any of them spoke or read much Russian.

“HOW MUCH?”

This time aimed at the shoulder of the one who’d hollered, a second shot lodged in his leather pauldron.

Upon scrutiny, this note stimulated an incredulous ruckus.  _$40 A Hit. The Good Shit._

“THIS ASS WANTS CASH!”

Codeine-like heaviness washed over him, fluid and loathsome. He’d only prepared three message vials, and the third seemed ill-timed without their clarification. He hooked a thumb in the neck hole of his hood and pulled it up enough to free his mouth, then with the gun across his lap used the other hand to project his voice. Head treading water somewhere between the sedative and the failure to persuade, he chose his words carefully.

“DO YOU... NOT USE DOLLARS OUT HERE?”

A different raider replied, agitated.

“CAPS OR NOTHING. DUNNO WHAT BACKASSARDS PLACE YOU’RE FROM. AIN’T NOBODY GOT  _CASH_.”

Caps? he wondered. Capsules? Baseball caps? No...  _bottle_  caps? How could he possibly respond to such a potential bluff, without blurting out how far behind the times his stasis had thrown him? He’d suspected the gold and silver standards could have long since been replaced by just about anything, but  _bottle caps_? He nearly couldn’t help but laugh. The third message vial would go unused. Slowly, he raised his cupped hand again, and the deranged delirium trickled out of him coolly.

“THE SAMPLES WERE DILUTE. YOU WANT THE PURE STUFF, YOU MAKE A CASH DEPOSIT TO THE CAPSULE PIPELINE OF THE PHARMACY.”

The commotion shuffled between irate to quiet to incredulous again.

“Forget you,” was the common dismissal as they all waved him off in frustration and walked away. Yet, he stayed his ground, and returned inside.

Within an hour, just over five hundred dollars, in a mixture of denominations, had appeared in the delivery chute in Eleanor’s office.

All told, he felt like he’d cut the raiders a steep discount at forty dollars a shot, a true bargain complete with a free introductory hit. Buffout wasn’t commercially available in an injectable form before the bombs, and for good reasons, foremost on account of its alimentary uptake routes. Yet, he could easily forge a racket in this fashion, and the unaware would buy either form of the steroid. From a pharmacological standpoint, in tablet form, the steroid pill worked out to about fifty dollars a dose, with a package running anywhere from $400-600; but altering it into a liqueous suspension, a chemist could squeeze at least twelve doses out of an eight-dose bottle without raising doubts. Epinephrine came far cheaper than the steroid, and the two enhanced one other stellarly--but the duration of the cocktail didn’t last as long as either on their own. ‘Choly had doled out samples which were almost entirely epinephrine, of which he had several hundred vials at his disposal at that given time. A common tactic for dealers in the time before the nuclear exchange, especially during the rations, it would likely serve him well here also.

Funny, how lacing most chems dilutes the potency of their side effects, while simultaneously skyrocketing the formation of addiction.

\+ + + + + + + + + + +

Over the next few days, ‘Choly made a routine of his rooftop chem breaks, so as to be able to deliver on the promised chems. Like clockwork, the raiders kept an eye out for ‘Choly and, sure enough, lined up to receive the moment they saw him load up his dart gun. Word got around, and he even got a few clients in the high rises across the way. He tried to memorize the faces of his repeat customers, even as they slowly increased in number, mostly as to limit administering his goods to someone who hadn’t actually paid for it.

To keep it simple for the time being, 'Choly limited himself to only Buffout, but if things continued as planned, he hoped to branch out into chemical families where he had more sophisticated knowledge as to tinker with them. Regardless, he’d have to switch things up, since synthesizing steroids and hormones was far beyond the scope of his capacity or education, and albeit a sizable supply, it was still a limited one.

Around a week later, ‘Choly rolled out onto the rooftop balcony for Lexington’s scheduled chem break, only to find around two dozen raiders encircling him. They’d flung down scaffolding across from one high rise and waited to ambush him. He swallowed hard, trying to keep them from seeing how badly he shook. Somehow, he expected one to come up to him and unmask him, but none did.

“Jared wants to speak to you,” a woman announced, porting threadbare plaid, a wild blonde mohawk, and black grease paint streaks across her face. She pointed her baseball bat at him. “It’s ill-advised to tell him you’re unavailable.”

‘Choly stiffened in his seat, but knew better than to make any sudden moves, or try to retreat inside.

“I,” he cleared his throat, “I’ll meet with him. I’ll meet you at street level in ten minutes or less.”

“You’re coming across the plank with us,” a second girl insisted, stepping forward and unholstering a small pistol from her gun harness. Her head was buzzed. A striped bandanna crossed the lower half of her face, and besides the harness, she wore little else. The pistol cocked in his direction and ‘Choly sniffed.

“I’m not resisting you. It’s just, this chair isn’t for looks or laziness.” The chemist glared at the scaffolding, haunted by the mere idea of it. “I. I don’t know the elevator situation in the next building over. I’ll meet you at street level, and you can take me wherever from there.”

“I’ll carry you then,” the second asserted, leaning in to take the syringe for herself, only to have ‘Choly shy from her as best he could. “I paid yesterday. Hit me and we’re golden for a solid five minutes. No problem.”

“Barb, stop.” The first one tapped her foot at her. “Don’t waste your high on Jared’s errand, babe. You. Hand over the whole case of Buffout to Barb here.”

The demand screwed up ‘Choly’s face under his cowl. It hurt more than a gunshot.

“ _Bleeding me dry here_ \--”

“--Shut up, or get roughed up,” the apparent leader snapped. When he complied, and Barb handed over the case to her, she shoved Barb forward again, addressing her compatriot first and then him. “I’ll save one for you, Barb. Accompany this... entrepreneur down to where we can bring ‘em back to the plant, would you? You understand we have to keep an eye on you.”

“ _Him_.” He choked on phlegm and a flinch, like a pill caught in his throat. When they didn’t object to specificity, a different delirium overtook him. “I. I understand full well. One. Only one, all right?”

“Sure,” the second, Barb, asserted.

‘Choly’s stomach dropped as Barb insisted upon taking hold of the handles of the chair and pushing him, rather than letting him push himself. About face, she jammed him up to the security console to reenter, and he shielded the keypad with both hands to keep her from seeing what he’d set the password to.

“Don’t get any funny ideas,” she muttered as they came inside alone.

“Aw, no, but those are the only kind I get,” he joked, clutching his syringer rifle. “The elevator’s over here.”

“How’s a dreg like you even end up in this place? I never seen somebody usin’ one of these things before. If you can’t walk, I don’t get it.”

“I didn’t have my morning Sugar Bombs today. I’d rather we didn’t try to make idle chitchat.”

“Whatever.”

They took the fourth floor elevator to the first. He’d hoped to encounter Angel along the way, but it seemed the Handy had been preoccupied elsewhere. Hiding a grimace as they navigated out, he planted his feet against the pavement.

“What gives?”

“I’m locking the front door, dammit.”

She rolled her eyes at him.

“ _Fine._ ”

Once he’d done so, they continued West down the street. His heart pounded in his head. The heightened senses of the Calmex would still last a good bit, and he could hear the feral ghouls loitering aimlessly nearby. He bit at his lower lip, with a death grip on his rifle.

“Aren’t we waiting for your friends?” he started, rubbernecking back as they passed the entire Super Duper Mart building.

“They’ll catch up. Hey, how fast s’this thing go?”

‘Choly gulped as she kicked him back onto his handrim wheels only, and sprinted letting out a spirited laugh. The frame of the wheelchair rattled uselessly, and the real threat of it falling apart from underneath him had him sweating cold. Past the high rises, the street sloped up to the Corvega building, and by then the rest of the group came up behind them as Barb slowed and set him back down proper. A turret puttered by the front entry, spotlit and stationed with a handful of other raiders.

The throng entered the building, and navigated the hallway to an elevator. Barb and the leader took it up to the third floor, the rest of them taking the stairs.

“Glad you could make it, Hewlett.”

“Shut up. Tryin’ to have all the fun without us. Oughtta keep your hit for that.”

Barb gasped.

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Ladies, ladies.” ‘Choly chuffed, dying of anxiety. “There’s more than enough of me to go around.”

Hewlett slapped him in the back of the head, and he got a clue.

The elevator opened and they entered the assembly floor of the plant. Those who had scaled the stairs tried to pretend they had followed to keep their guns on ‘Choly, rather than to eavesdrop. Certain elements of immaturity in this operation got the chemist smiling to himself.

“Jared!” Hewlett called out to the foreman’s office at the top of a set of bar-grate stairs. “You gotta visitor.”

With streaked white face paint which matched Hewlett’s, a black man with a short mohawk stepped out of the office and looked down over the assembly machinery to his compatriots, gripping at the handrail with a deadly look in his grinning eye.

“Glad you could make it, chem-dreg. We got business to discuss.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A modestly shorter chapter than usual.
> 
> The vacuum of dramatic irony closing the gap between you and Kara popped my ears.

With a simple hand wave as Jared turned back inside the foreman’s office, Barb and Hewlett knew to wheel Melancholy up the long bar grate ramp that traced the far side of the assembly line floor. ‘Choly knew better than to contest whether he propel himself or they propel him--Jared had not only easily forty warm bodies in his stead, but also a number of active turrets. Once the two raiders had delivered him to their boss, they fell back to the steel mezzanine to remain on call.

“Good to finally meet you.” The painted black man took a seat himself in the segmented office chair and flipped the tails of his sleeveless leather coat out from under him. “What’s your name?”

“You can call me Melancholy,” he fumbled, still clutching his syringer. The whole automotive plant hung in a stale, metallic rot. ‘Choly couldn’t say he’d seen this man’s face perching in rank on the car plant’s roof. “And you’re... Jared.”

“Melancholy? Huh. Not gonna ask how you came about that one, but I’m also not gonna question it.” Jared stroked at yesterday’s stubble and squinted at him. “No, it can’t be a coincidence, you being in a chair like that. Tell me, friend... How’s your experience with Jet?”

The chemist wasn’t sure what the wheelchair had to do with anything. His cowl concealed how genuinely baffled he was by Jared’s comment, unable to tell if it meant anything at all.

“Lot of effort just to place a work order. I can get you some, if you hook me up with the resources and space to manufacture it, if that’s what you’re asking. My lab’s not currently set up for Jet. Not ideally, anyway.”

He hadn’t himself ever distilled Jet, but he’d helped a retainer who’d used him and Hawthorne as a middleman enough times to know the basics.

Jared’s eyes widened a bit and he crossed his arms slowly.

“Now that’s a reply I wasn’t expecting. What kind of resources we talking?”

The lack of probability in this encounter boxed ‘Choly’s ears a bit. Everything felt at once both covertly coded and non sequitur.

“Brahmin manure. Lots of it. And every plastic container you can find.”

“Sounds pretty simple.”

“Oh, it’s really--not,” he saved, realizing he nearly let the entrepreneurial edge slip past him. But then it sank in Jared had no objections to  _brahmin_  and 'Choly hemmed a bit. “Brahmin are cows with entrails mutated by tainted feed before the war. I don’t know how many of those have survived. Regular cows aren’t going to work.” When Jared grew visibly irritated, ‘Choly coughed. “And even if you could find me brahmin, it’s honestly quite sophisticated to distill Jet. Takes a lot of precise measurements. And, by extension, the means of metering doses into ampuoles.”

“You must be quite the chemist. I’m impressed. My outfit thinks you’re a real showman.” Jared kicked his feet up on the file cabinetry next to him, and casually flicked out a switchblade from some pocket, to pick at his fingernails. “I don’t know what rock you crawled out from under, but brahmin are the only cattle that survived the war. We can discuss nitpicking details later. But first, back to the actual type of answer I was  _expecting_...” After a while of trying to stay calm, he jammed down the switchblade in the arm of the chair and left it. “What kind of experiences do you have with  _taking_  Jet?”

‘Choly’s eyes glazed a bit at even trying to recall his recent fly-blown veneer. He sniffed.

“Gives me some interesting inspiration. I don’t dabble with it much. More of a Berries fellow, personally.”

“Berries?” That got the raider leader’s attention. “What kind of  _berries_?”

“Berry Mentats,” ‘Choly elaborated, more self-conscious by the minute. “They’re far more potent than typical Mentats. Taste better, too, if you ask me. I’ve got a wide selection of things I can get for you. Stuff I can guarantee you haven’t heard of since  _before_  the world ended.”

“And what’s stopping me and my outfit from storming that dandy little ‘pharmacy’ of yours and just taking it all for ourselves?”

“You need someone to cook the stuff, don’t you?” A muffled giggle came from him, an attempt to cut the stress of having his new home threatened like that. “...Besides, I don’t have all the components I need. I have most of them, for most things, but I will guarantee you, very little of what’s  _stocked_  in that building is viable without a chemistry degree to revitalize it.”

Jared began to rock in the chair impatiently, then stared deadpan at him.

“Melancholy, that hood is starting to piss me off. Take it off.”

“Why? I like it.” The momentary lapse of better judgment folded the wad of canvas into his lap in concession. Jared was still staring, and ‘Choly trembled. “I--”

“You are a  _scrawny_  little fucker, you know that?”

“I--” ‘Choly wheezed, still unable to read the guy. “Yeah. No shit.”

“And you keep derailing me. Pay attention. Are you fucking high right now?”

“I’m fond of sampling the goods, yes.” He caressed his cheek with the side of the copper barrel of his blowgun, and looked to Jared thoughtfully. “I’m paying attention. I just don’t get what you’re trying to get at. Are you afraid to ask outright? I mean, it’s impossible to waste  _my_ time right now. I was about to deliver the day’s chems, when your folks grabbed me. That caught me by surprise. I never would have thought I’d get ambushed on a  _roof_.”

“Like that, did ya? Gonna have to tell Lonnie how it worked so well, even you were impressed by it. Couldn’t say no, could ya?” Jared grinned at him. “Does Jet give you the sight? Or those Berries? What do they make you see? Are you seeing anything right now? Is that what’s got you so weird right now?”

Sight? Was ‘Choly supposed to understand?

“Mentats and Jet are a... most unsavory pairing.” His voice cracked a bit, and he glanced down to his dart cases. “At least, in my personal experience.”

Jared stopped grinning, his glare intense.

“Do... does what you see with them ever, like. Actually end up happening?”

“ _Fuck, I wish_ \--” In an instant, ‘Choly clamped a hand over his own mouth, writhing in an ache of just  _imagining_  his vapors manifesting in reality. He squinted and squirmed lower in his chair to prevent a grunted moan from escaping between his fingers. He unclenched and melted backwards a bit, heels fast in the stirrups of the chair to steady himself, trying to save face. With every statement escaping his lips, he wondered why his mental filter culled some idiot commentary while permitting others that seemed just as poor in taste. “...What, do yours?”

“That’s between me and them,” Jared muttered. He rose abruptly and began to pace with restless rigor and a ragged breath. Suddenly he pointed at ‘Choly from across the room with a near glower. “You draft up a list of what you’re gonna need to cook stuff for me. Be as precise as you’re bullshitting me that you need to be. I’ll make it happen. This whole fucking town needs to be  _swimming_  in Jet.”

“I can do that. Not sure what you intend to do with that much cow shit, but--  _hm_.” ‘Choly stroked at the blow gun, conniving. “Delivery. Now there’s a word with several flavors. Jet, as I’m sure you know it, is an inhalant. A vapor. Would it be weird of me, to posit the intrigue of edibles, or even... inject-ables?”

“What, no! One thing at a time, you ass. Don’t derail me. You get Jet flowing through this place, and maybe we can talk about getting you set up to toy with experimenting with other chems. ...I gotta ask, though. The rumor’s too strong.” The blow gun drooped. “Why  _cash_?”

“Everyone keeps trying to convince me no one uses cash anymore, but when I don’t budge on my prices, it still ends up lining my pockets. I don’t understand.”

“Gotta wipe your ass with somethin’, I guess.”

That definitely got under ‘Choly’s skin, and he clenched his teeth a moment.

“What  _should_  be my asking price? Should it be in  _caps_?”

“That’s the sane and normal thing to demand.” Jared didn’t like this, his brow knitted wild and tight. “God, how high are you? What else is there but Nuka caps?”

“Maybe I ought to go by Rip Van Winkle, rather than Melancholy. If all this has been a trip, I hope it kills me.” ‘Choly looked to Jared, eyes dull but pleasant. “Maybe it did kill me. Trapped in my last hit for eternity.”

“...Well--” Jared squirmed just enough ‘Choly could see it. “I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure, but. You are so fucking weird. I can’t tell yet if I like you or hate you.”

“You’re going to end up doing both, I assure you.”

“--No, more like  _it’s been real_.” Jared chuckled at his own inside joke, but shut up abruptly when ‘Choly hadn’t left yet. “Get out of here and take inventory of your shit. I’ll send somebody to collect your... shopping list around midnight. Leave it in your... capsule pipe or somethin’. Hey Hewlett, Barb.” When they came into the office, he waved them at ‘Choly. “Take Melancholy back to his pharmacy.”

Barb leaped at the opportunity to terrorize him again, snatching the chair handles with a lunatic glimmer in her saucer-wide eyes. He imagined she had to have been grinning like a Cheshire under that kerchief.

“You ready to ride like hell? ...You look miserable with the hood off, dreg.”

“I. I know. ...Before I go, can we make the rounds of the assembly floor? I need to plan out some things for Jared, and I think there might be some useful equipment here for what he’s contracting me for.”

“Whatever.” Hewlett grunted, hitting his handrim wheel with her bat, not unlike a rider spurring a horse. “Get goin’.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pretty hard surveillance tw on this one, ah.
> 
> You get a cookie if you can spot the historical conspiracy reference.

Melancholy locked the pharmacy's front door behind himself, then wheeled to the back and took the elevator to the second floor. As he exited the car, Angel came from the break room about the same time, and stopped him in the lounge area.

"Ah, Sir!" It paused, genuinely confused. "Did you just come from  _downstairs_? I was just thinking I needed to check on you. How did your little rooftop rendezvous go with your chums, ha ha!"

"--About that." 'Choly chewed at his lip and eyed his Handy-bot. He favored pushing past it in the belief it would follow. "I know it's a bit early, but could I bother you for a bit of dinner? Really, anything will do."

"Good that you're open to variety," Angel replied, right behind him as expected, "for we haven't got it. I'm afraid all we have left is Halloween candy, a few boxes of Instamash, and BlamCo Mac. Really, we should consider replenishing our pantry next you feel up to it. Perhaps a trip to the grocer's is in order, hm? You did outfit me with this dandy harness, and update my hydraulics, so that I might facilitate that kind of endeavor, after all." It held up two boxes, a red and gold square one and a thin flat teal one. "Would you rather the potatoes or the macaronis?"

"Mm. The macaronis."

While it put back the square box and commenced preparation of the other, it hummed a jaunty vaguely-British tune which its owner couldn't quite place. 'Choly set down his syringer and hood on the table, and with a lump in his throat, he watched the robot.

"Angel, I've been giving it some thought. About how Defense Intelligence Agency gifted me with you when I first came over. I... I know the DIA used you to spy on me. That it wasn't just nationalization effort to adjust me to culture and language. I also know the DIA fell with the rest of the government. We can talk more openly now, don't you think? Being honest with you is going to help us both help each other. Sure, they all thought I was a Russian spy or something, but really?  _They_  approached  _me_ , offered me the position at Deenwood. Part of transplanting key Asian experts into the US military, best I can tell. What can I say? I get bribed easily with promise of access to big toys. But really. All I was hiding was chem trafficking. Lots and lots of chem trafficking."

"I know, Sir."

"--Hawthorne and I--" The chemist cringed and glazed over. "Wait, what?"

"I know all about you and Mister Hawthorne's business practices. I didn't report any of that because it's not what I was programmed to identify and report. They cared only how you handled confidential information. My objections to your proclivities have always wholly been in my interest of preserving your health and quality of life, Sir." It stopped a moment to let the saucepan boil on the hot plate, but readily resumed stirring it as needed. "I am still transmitting this to proper authorities, mind."

The inability to process Angel's response elicited a strange smile.

"Yes, of course. You're likely transmitting to skeletons, but I understand."

He nearly related that Communism had lost, but so had Capitalism. It didn't serve to argue no clear winner when in the nuclear exchange, everyone had lost. His head hurt, between the goings-on with Jared and learning his robot had concealed this level of self-awareness from him from the beginning. In attempting transparency so his activities would come as no surprise, he could have never expected his  _robot_  to reciprocate such honesty.

Back when he trafficked chems under the paranoia of crossing the DIA's scrutiny, he'd taught himself enough robotics to defuse what bugging technology he could identify, such that these variably sophisticated sensors transmitted all-clear, where simply disabling them would have drawn attention to any tampering. Yet, even now the remnants of his robotics knowledge would benefit him, to perform maintenance on this stunning testament to the longevity of General Atomics craftsmanship.

Still, the possibility nagged in the back of his head, that Angel's transmissions might ever amount to conflict. He'd discounted the possibility of an existing surviving population, after all. He could get all manner of things wrong, including the radio death of the DIA. He'd have to do something about the bugging equipment, to sate his paranoia. Regardless, it relieved him that his cyclomorphine research had only come up between him and his business partner within the month leading up to the apocalypse. The nature of the chems he had skimmed hadn't stimulated his Handy to rat him out, but provided that it ever determined that any of the military compounds he'd formulated had left the compound...

Worst of all, he understood with horror, was the likelihood he was entirely right about the demise of the Agency. The only thing that had kept him in line after his American conscription was the thread of surveillance. Who now existed in this wasteland save himself compassionate enough to mitigate his moral compass for him? He doubted even he could keep himself from acting out on fantasies any longer, the more he recognized them trickling into mundane waking world. Of any aspect of this creeping reality, that terrified him most: more than the ghouls, more than the mutated insects, more than anything else he had not yet encountered that his imagination could not reliably fabricate. Who had the audacity to grant him self-agency?

Angel, presenting its owner a bowl of creamy reconstituted pasta, startled him from his waking nightmare.

" _Bh--hoze--_ " He found himself frowning as he rapidly and repeatedly retraced his platysmal scar. Angel joined the bowl with a shot glass and the near-empty bottle of whiskey, and he poured himself a glass with his head hung. "Thanks, Angel."

"Sorry to startle you. You were most lost in thought."

"Doesn't change a thing." He favored eating over starting with the liquor for once. After a few bites, he cleared his throat. "So, I suppose I should explain my sudden willing openness. I have a job now. Salaried. I might still pick at the by-commission rooftop sales on the side, if it goes smoothly."

"My stars! What exciting news." Angel's movements seemed lyrical and airy a moment before it shifted to a scattered panic. "When do you start! Oh, oh dear. We've nothing for you to take for lunch! We must--"

"Angel. Angel, it's all right." 'Choly snapped his fingers a few times, then continued eating. "Stay with me. Maybe once I get Jared the information he needs, we can make a trip out of the pharmacy. That way, I can draft a laundry list of what all we need to scavenge for."

"Apologies, Sir. I'm just..." It idled beside him with its tendril-limbs curled up close. "I'm so eager for both of us. You've no idea how elated I am that I can foster vocational habits in you again. Tend to you, like... before. The normality of routine--that's the cement you need to get back to your old self. Ha ha!"

"Mmh. Makes two of us." He washed down the cardboardesque pasty mouthful with half the shot and, with a sigh, absently tapped his spoon in the dish. "I doubt the lab here would be suitable for the scale of distillation he described. Don't much like the idea of that much manure in the pharmacy, anyway. You're fond of reminding me not to bring home my work with me, and I think we can both agree that this building is very much becoming my home now. I don't think you need to remind me to leave  _that_  elsewhere."

"I haven't the slightest what you're on about, but  _manure_? Yes, I'm quite glad we're in agreement that it doesn't belong indoors."

"Talking aloud. Imagine it doesn't make much sense. Mm mmh." He finished off the serving and shot glass, and sat back in thought. "I surveyed the assembly plant before I returned, and I think there's a good place there to set up a vat-style rig. Lots of pipes to make use of. Maybe... maybe refining a few water heaters...." With a sniff, he adjusted his glasses and glanced down to his Pip-Boy. "I'm going to get working on my invoice. Thank you for dinner."

"Of course, Mister Carey!" It cleared the table for him.

"I'm going to have to fix that one of these days," 'Choly mumbled to himself as he wandered off in the chair to nurture a Berries-induced engineering conflagration.

Taking stock as he navigated the building, he absently annotated in his Pip-Boy with blind keyless keystrokes, and as he went, he cross-referenced these against a more coherent draft he composed for Jared. In his ramble, he listed off various possible equipment which they could combined into a small-scale substitute for the mechanisms by which to load the crate of empty inhalers he had on hand in the pharmacy lab. To sustain the chem habit Jared sought to cultivate, there would have to be a tacit recycling effort of paraphernalia until they could locate more actuators. Too, he requested minimal opposition from Jared's crew as he toured Lexington, endearing that the city must already belong to the raider boss, or inevitably that it would. Something of this new world civility tickled 'Choly, and he guarded any potential conflict with the raiders by asking permission to scout the Super Duper Mart. Self-serving, he also tacked on a postscript that Jared's crew supply him with large quantities of Abraxo cleaner, to make possible synthesizing fresh Mentats of any variety, and he cited the need to stay sharp for the task at hand. By the end of the evening, he read it all over one more time and transcribed it onto a piece of card stock packaging, then shoved the results in the capsule pipeline.

He sank into his seat at Eleanor's desk and slumped his head along his outstretched arms. He popped a few painkillers in his mouth and chewed them mindlessly, and washed it down with the stale coffee he'd forgotten on the desk at some point. The familiar post-Berries headache crawled across his skull, but he hardly cursed it. The brain was just like a muscle in some regards, after all--running a marathon is a very different thing for someone who's prepared at length for it as opposed to someone who dashes from start to finish without even stretching beforehand. The habit would return. He'd gladly nurse it.

As he started to drift off, radio static echoed in Eleanor's office. Bewildered, he squinted and rubbed at his head as he pushed the button on the intercom.

"Chemist--" The caller was Jared. "You expect me to read this novel when you've got a working comm?"

'Choly grunted and resumed leaning on the desk. He hadn't expected Jared to come himself.

"I can hear your awful face paint loud and clear." He stiffened, double checking whether the button was depressed for automatic two-way chat, or if he'd simply held it a moment to check the caller. He swallowed hard and pushed the button again, hoping Jared hadn't heard that. "Sorry. I have more than a bit of a headache right now. And this is the first I knew that restoring power to the building had also restored the intercom."

"Fuck you're longwinded." Jared paused at length. "It's always the quiet ones. Ugh."

"Apologies. I was just trying to be thorough. Operating on the presumption that our correspondences over the invoice would all be written word, I just figured that a comprehensive list of everything that came to mind would limit how much time got wasted. I'm guessing you've had a chance to look it over?"

"Yeah, I got it. Flattery will get you everywhere in my town. You have the most unnervingly good handwriting I've ever seen, but I still can't believe I'm reading this right. You want in the SDM? You really are crazy. I'm not wasting warm bodies on that, but far be it for me to turn down the proposition of you spreading around any profit to be had of your confidence that you can manage it. Try not to die before we even get started. And get me some Sugar Bombs while you're at it."

Even Jared thought it a terrible plan to try to scavenge the grocer's for food reserves. 'Choly would have to think things through for certain, and he hid his anxiety over it behind a tiny chuckle.

"Heh, I can do that. What... about the other things I mentioned?"

"You've gone from asking for cash to asking for a metric fuckton of soap. That's marginally more sane than most of the things you've said today, but even that's pushing it. We're going in the right direction. Yeah, I've got a lead on where to load up on Abraxo, but remember. I'm only interested in Mentats as far as they're helpful to distilling my Jet.  _My_  project takes priority over any of your unrelated fun, and don't forget it." Jared snorted. "Still, you're going to have to let me try some of these infamous Berries you won't shut up about."

"Oh, for certain." 'Choly rubbed at his temples, his voice strained. "I swear by them. Only way I got through my military contract."

When Jared had nothing to say for a little too long, 'Choly realized that had been entirely the wrong thing to say.

"You a fuckin Brotherhood defector? That takes balls."

"Oh, I, no. The actual military. I'm a Pharm Corps chemist. Nine years, eight months, for Anchorage."

That had been an even worse thing to say.

"--I grow impatient with this conversation, chemist. Give me a few days to gather up what you've requested. Answer your damn comm when I come knocking." Jared snarled. "You're really starting to piss me off. If you're gonna get high like this all the time, at least journal your trips so they're useful to more than just you, all right?"

This time, 'Choly remained silent for a bit. Had he heard the raider right?

"You... want a transcript of my high?" 'Choly licked his lips and held in a breath as he stared at his Pip-Boy. "I... I can absolutely do that. You're in luck that that's... already an habituation of mine."

"All right. Now that, I like to hear. Expect to share. Both... experience  _and_  goods. Heh." At first, 'Choly had thought that was the end of it, but then Jared came back with somewhat sarcastic enthusiasm. "Let me know how your grocery trip goes."

"For certain."

When the intercom stayed idle for several minutes, relief oozed out of him, and he slouched back in the chair with a groan. He removed his glasses and dug his fingers into his eyelids. He could appreciate that Jared was on board with his plan, and that the raider was willing to accommodate interests that ran in direct tangent to the grand scheme. But, this conversation also solidified the contract into something tangible and unable to ignore. The chemist had a job again. Responsibilities. Someone he had to answer to. On the other hand, this also meant more of the building worked than he thought previous. If he intended to set foot outside the pharmacy, he was going to have to throw together a sign for the intercom, so that anyone who came calling would know he wasn't just blowing them off.

In the mean time, he took to the couch in Eleanor's office and passed out halfway through disrobing.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Injury tw, dead bodies tw. I don’t know how to concisely quantify what’s so upsetting about this chapter. Dramatic irony? Ow.

'Choly opted to confront the Super Duper Mart from the dock doors. He hacked the terminal outside and opened one of the two broad-panel rolling shutter doors, then adjusted his sack hood as he stepped foot inside. With his hand already on his .38, he glanced around to assess nothing on the dock held anything of value. Angel got the first shot when their entry roused three feral ghouls who had lain down lifeless in the loading bay, in and under the back of a Pick-R-Up parked inside it. 'Choly dry-swallowed and wasted five bullets taking down the remaining two ghouls. Shaking, he approached a fourth body, chewed up and crumpled between a crate and a stack of palettes. She looked to have belonged to a militia group, and a crank-powered laser musket lay near her feet. Cautious, he patted down her pockets to find only a holotape, but he didn't stop to listen to it just yet. Sweating, he could tell she had sheltered here, only to be ambushed by the ghouls that he and Angel had just cut down.

He didn't like the comparison, how the two of them had managed to dispatch all three ferals, when no fewer than three must have overwhelmed her. A robotic ally had made all the difference. The corpse hadn't remained there more than a few weeks at most, further evidence of multiple factions of life in this new world, yet she looked like she'd dressed from a history book. He took a solicitous wonder from the encounter, what vestiges of pre-apocalyptic society had survived all this time. Was this woman one of the Brotherhood Jared had mentioned? No matter what, he didn't like this as his first encounter inside the walls of the grocer's.

Shaking, he approached his Handy-Bot, and it acknowledged the hand to its spherical chassis and lowered its thrusters enough for its owner to mount the strap-stirrups and balance across its top using the fabric harness's strap handles.

"Are we good to continue onward, Sir?"

"Best we can hope for."

They ascended the concrete stairs into a maintenance area. Four more ghouls rose from their stasis and rushed them. The mangled, wiry wretches lunged, clawed, and hiss-frothed in a fury.

"Hold stlil, would you!" Angel savored slicing them down in succession with its tendril-limb's circular saw attachment. "By God, if I had hands, I'd strangle the life from you!"

"I... I think we're good for now, Angel..."

Something in his bowels churned at the knowledge that all these ghouls had once been people, and that by attacking him, they gave him no choice but to destroy them. Something deeper still within him knotted up, that Angel might genuinely now enjoy serving carnage, and he dearly hoped he could determine why and how it could bypass its violence protocols to act out in such a way. It didn't have any Mister Gutsy algorithms, did it? Perhaps he'd tuned something in its calibrations he ought not have.

'Choly nudged Angel to proceed forward a ways, to inspect the still-lit instrument panels of the backup generators. He didn't dismount, but bent to one side to reach at it. With a deployment button, he ejected the modestly sized canister and collected it in the hopes of purposing it toward Jared's project. The dull whir of the engine which the self-contained nuclear battery had powered slowed to a stop. The few lights in the back area flickered off, rendering darkness besides the sunlight which filtered in through the broken walls and roof. 'Choly's spine electrified as he turned on his Pip-Boy's screen light and tucked the nuclear battery into Angel's storage compartment.

Mouth full of cotton, he looked over the generator panel to reaffirm his memory, that this military checkpoint generator would not take back the fusion core. If not deployed with proper protocols, one could not replace a fusion core once removed, new or otherwise. They had to frustrate tampering or occupation of any kind, after all. And of course, he'd never actually interacted with them personally before, only known of them, so he didn't think of the consequences until after he'd already misstepped.

"Something tells me taking the FC was a mistake. It was the last one powering the place."

"We'll manage. Moving onward, shall we, Sir?"

"--Of. Of course."

To their right lay a wall of maintenance cabinetry, with a hallway to its right and a broken wall to its left. They navigated down the hall, lined with bracket shelving. Angel shot its laser behind itself and dispatched a ghoul that had gained on them from the room with the broken wall. 'Choly nearly jumped out of his skin and, shivering, clutched the harness straps even tighter. They came up into the kitchen area of the à la carte window, and two more ghouls lashed out at them, only to meet Angel's circular saw. 'Choly's face scrunched in displeasure at the dry, sour smell of all the long-abandoned cooking equipment. They found nothing still in package in the kitchen that hadn't burst from spoiling.

"We... we've encountered... ten ghouls now?" He tried to count on his fingers. "And those were just part of the staff, I'm sure. There had to have been at least that many customers, several times over. It was Saturday morning when everything went bottoms-up. Pretty much every middle class family did their shopping on the weekend, first thing. This... I didn't think this through well enough." The chemist stared down the employee-only doors before them and steeled a tremor by chewing up a Mentat.

"Balderdash, Sir. We can handle this without a hitch! Neither of us has a single scratch yet. And we've got our wits about us. These curs haven't! Ha ha!"

"I... I'm not so sure, but... maybe you're right. Maybe we do have an edge. Make a run for the front door, will you? We ought to have come in the front from the start, but clearly I miscalculated what we were getting into..."

"A ha! Just as I thought. You've got a plan after all."

"When we get to the atrium, you're going to let me off and give me cover fire while I gain access to the front office. You and I, the two of us can handle a dozen ferals on our own. But, I think we should do our best to even the odds a bit." 'Choly stuttered a sigh. "Provided the help is still operational. I did just yank the FC. Its charging station might not even deploy now. But at least if I find that I can't get it running, we'll be near an exit, and we can break away and regroup--"

"Cheerio!" it exclaimed, leaping upon the first sign of anything resembling optimism.

Laser and saw blazing, Angel burst through the double-action swing doors which separated the employees only zone from the store front, and didn't slow to clear a path. 'Choly counted the ghouls that stirred as they sped headlong through the chilled section, and also did his best to take mental stock of what looked worth revisiting once they could contend with the store's patrons who hadn't left in two hundred years. An unfamiliar pale blue emated from one of the crates in an open top merchandiser freezer island, and he swore to double back to investigate that if nothing else.

Angel managed to sever the leg of one persistent feral ghoul, but it clung onto 'Choly from behind. He screamed and elbowed it in its wasted, misshapen face. Angel's subsequent swerve to round about-face bucked off its owner and the freeloader both across the peeling linoleum floor of the atrium. The ghoul went for 'Choly's throat, and he fought through his searing left leg and managed to slap the wretch across the face. He steadied two shots somewhere between its collarbones. When it stopped moving, 'Choly tried his best to catch his breath. He stood and flinched, and approached the domed glass charging station against the wall beside the mess of shopping carts. Larger establishments, especially franchises, almost always had a Protectron at their employ, and there it stood idle as expected, a stocky bipedal robot with a glass plate with visible mechanisms where one might have reasonably found a face. He smiled in fleeting reassurance, powering through what was likely either a twisted joint or even perhaps a broken bone.

"All right. There's a good chance this isn't going to work, but you're going to have to help me out here. Keep them off me."

"Right!"

'Choly cut to the left side of the atrium, pistol at the ready as he skimmed the area with his breath in his throat, and with his back to the customer service window, he shuffled around the corner. He tucked away the weapon in favor of bobby pin and screwdriver. The door's wooden panes had partially broken away at the top, but he knew in a time crunch better than to try to reach the inside knob to let himself in. Picking the lock, he entered the office easily. He slammed shut the shoddy door and pulled down the rolling shutter over the window, and locked everything he could. Only then did he slump into the desk chair in exasperation.

Once he had a moment to breathe, he overheard a muffled mixture of British taunting, laser fire, power tool sounds, and guttural grunt-roaring. Angel wasted no time at all clearing out as many ghouls as it could. It really couldn't distinguish that these shambling, irascible, mutated husks had ever been human, could have ever been customers, neighbors, or perhaps even colleagues of his. Had the radiation done this to them? Or had something far worse transpired here in Northeast Massachusetts? Briefly, he theorized the possibility that the warheads that had decimated the population had been salted with some unthinkable biohazardous agent. It certainly would explain the severe mutations of anything that survived the nuclear exchange. Try as he might to contain his spiraling anxiety, the chemist's imagination could only handle so much speculation as far as how many ghouls populated the building at this point without catastrophizing, let alone broad attempts to examine any theoretical underpinnings of the apocalypse. So, he did his best to shelter himself into the room mentally as well, and he got to work on the customer service terminal.

With the use of his decryption holotape, he easily gained access to the Protectron activation sequence. He racked his hazy recollection for basic code instructions, on bated breath for some time, before he instructed the Protectron to power on in security mode, and to treat the Mister Handy on site as an ally. He waited motionless with eyes wide, hoping to hear some sign that the second robot had joined in, and importuned the construct's battery to still have a charge. The characteristic halted 'Pro-Tect And Serve' line sounded off and he wheezed out a sigh of relief. From there he bided his time hacking the safe in the corner. The cash, he welcomed, which he shoved into his whitish dress shirt, but more pressing were the several boxes of .38 bullets, and another .38 pistol. The new gun had pitiful specifications compared to the one he'd taken from Gretchen's safe, but he pocketed it as well regardless.

Once he could no longer hear continued assault from either of his trusty robotic allies, he put the Protectron's mode back to standard patrol using the terminal. When Angel did not object to this, he peeked out from the bottom of the rolling window shutter to survey who and what remained standing. The ghouls had not felled either robot, and from the looks of them, the robots had won with hardly a hitch. He pumped a fist and let the shutter crash back down, and he reloaded his pistol before stepping foot outside the office.

"The coast is clear, Sir!" Angel announced, returning to its owner's side.

The Protectron marched about the front end, and it chirped, flat and uneven: "Thank you for shopping at Su-Per-Du-Per-Mart."

"That worked a little too well," 'Choly remarked, tucking his gun in his back pocket again and rounding the registers to empty them and take all the periodicals. He also emptied the cigarette machine by the customer service window of all its menthols. They left the security robot to its own devices. He glanced up pathetically to his Handy, and finally requested his cane.

The chemist hobbled back to the cold section to scrutinize the row of open top merchandiser freezer islands. He instructed Angel to snatch all the Salisbury steaks. They also gathered up a variety of Nuka Colas, and the suspicious glow from before had come from a brand new flavor he'd never before tasted let alone heard of: Nuka Cola Quantum. He wondered what flavor it must be, and what might make it continue to glow as it did, even two hundred years after Nuka Valley bottled its last batches. Surely, it would exhibit just as much headiness as a perfectly aged Nuka Cherry.

They cleaned out the aisles of Sugar Bombs, Fancy Lads Snack Cakes, and Yum Yum Deviled Eggs, and 'Choly also ensured they hit the spirits. He put his hands on a single box of Abraxo that had not been crushed in the ceiling collapse that had many years prior demolished the center of the supermarket. The elements could pour in through the decayed wound in the roof, and many papers which had come to scatter the checkerboarded linoleum now formed a thick, soured papier mache along the majority of the flooring. Beneath the concrete and metal rubble lay where the toiletries and cleaning supplies, in theory, ought have been located, and he frowned furiously and mumbled as he rearranged Angel's storage compartment a bit. Hopefully, this hadn't been Jared's idea of a soap cache.

They raided the cabinets of the cafe in the front corner of a few sets of flatware and some melamine plates and bowls, cheap but still a vast upgrade from the mismatched dishes left behind in the pharmacy break room. 'Choly also emptied the cafe's first aid kit, pocketing the Stimpak and storing the rest. He glanced wryly to the skeletons and mixture of ghoul carnage that littered the eating area. The demise of the two skeletons at a booth had definitely interrupted their final date, with one's arm slung across the shoulder of the other. His eyes met the jukebox at the far end of the eating area, and he wondered what song had played at 9:47am that morning. After entertaining the thought a while, he decided he didn't like it, and moved on to the true potential prize: the pharmacy.

He hadn't expected to find all that much in terms of chems, considering it was a grocer's pharmacy, impacted more stringently by the war rations than the full stand-alone pharmacy which supplied the military and police. But, he still hoped to locate a good cache of first aid, and possibly even some more barberine syrup. The queue leading up to the pickup-checkout window at the pharmacy had all crumpled in a bony mess in the floor, some having toppled the chained stanchions atop themselves as they fell perimortem. He looted the handbaskets of whomever had them, procuring a fistful of damage-halting Med-X's, and a bottle of pink bismuth. His eyes flickered over to the pharmacy cage to survey what kind of odds he'd have locating anything on its shelves, and he saw another dead militia member sprawled out on the island in the middle of it. His heart turned to lead, remembering the woman from before.

On his way along the wall to the employee door in the back corner, he cleared out the shelves of any decongestants, painkillers, cotton, antiseptics, smelling salts, and bandages, and steeled himself to pick the lock. A breath clawed at him when he opened it, and he immediately fell backward caught off guard by two ghoulified pharmacy technicians crawling out from under the counters to attack. Angel dispatched them while 'Choly coddled his injured leg, and he collapsed into a loose fetal position in emotional exhaustion.

"The pharmacy is safe now, Sir," the Handy-Bot reported, cautious concern in its tone as it returned to his side. "It seems you're down for the count for the moment, though. If you tell me what to pick out, I'll retrieve it for you while you rest."

"--Mentats," he jolted out, trailing into cursing in Russian under his breath. "Stimpaks. Any first aid. Daddy-O, if I'm that lucky. Buffout. Barberine.  _All of the pharmaceutical stock you can carry._ "

"Little would please me more," it soothed, complying.

"...We really did it, didn't we?" he uttered quietly, looking around at the unsettling establishment.

While Angel did the final recon, 'Choly hiked up his pant leg and took off his boot to inspect the damage his spill had yielded. A few ginger, seethed palpations suggested to him the swelling came from a sprain rather than a broken bone, but he still administered the Stimpak syringe to the injury to help speed up the healing process and stiffened it out as straight as he could in the mean time. He ejected the decryption holotape from his Pip-Boy, then fished out the holotape from the militiawoman and popped it in to look it over. Her name was Emma, best he could tell, and the holotape had an audio file on it, which she'd used the dock terminal to record.

"What the hell is Josh doing? He's been gone for over an hour. We need to get out of here. The guys are thinking we're already at Concord. If Josh would hurry his ass up, maybe we can get there in time." She took a panicked breath. "Shit, gunfire. Not good. Josh--!"

When the playback clicked off, it was clear to 'Choly that Emma had abruptly ejected the holotape and hurried to grab her gun to go help her partner. But, she'd never gotten that far, it seemed. 'Choly consciously slacked his clenched teeth. He wondered if Josh was the man yards away from him, sprawled across the island, or if even more militiamen had fallen here. They didn't appear to have had a clue what they were getting into here. The place unnerved him too much to justify investigating the situation any further.

Angel was right: they had the upper hand here because they came in with half a mind what to expect. Sobered tremendously to any romanticized bias to the ghouls, he could feel the very real carnage in every inch of this place, just from where he sat. Had he just gotten lucky a few weeks ago when he encountered Hawthorne and the others? This wasn't like the horror movies. Not at all. He looked up to Angel as it came up again, and couldn't hide sniveling.

"Come now, Sir. Let's be off to the pharmacy with you, so you can rest up and be in peak shape for when you start work later this week!"

"Don't remind me," he groaned, taking off his hood.

He tried to put his boot back on, but his ankle was still too swollen, so he hoisted himself up atop his Handy and tossed it and his hood into the storage compartment. He sloppily wiped his face with his sleeve. "I... I already made an abominable first impression. I'm sure these people I'm going to be working with already have it in their heads to hate me."

"A poor first impression can only be rectified with a fantastical second impression," it encouraged on their way to the front door. "You'll simply have to wow them beyond doubt as to your skill and knowledge. They'll come around to seeing just how indispensible you are. Besides! Think of everything we amassed today! You can shower them with all manner of delights. And you're eating decadently tonight--I insist. You deserve it."

'Choly sank into the straps, favoring the healing leg and bearing down on his right with his to compensate. He hid a small, fatigued smile with his face against the cool pale blue spherical chrome chassis of his saving grace.

"You know just exactly what to say to take my mind off of it all."


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Location [Cleared]. I... guess.

'Choly ejected the holotape from Eleanor's terminal and hesitated before pocketing it. He'd spent the remainder of yesterday recovering from his and Angel's supermarket trip. But, now that he'd rested up, he endeavored today to prepare a care package of sorts, in the bated optimism of demonstrating gratitude for the job Jared had extended him. He'd spent much of the day revising his tripartite Berry-Jet ode for more general digest, and abridged it into two simpler sections: a humble preamble which functioned as a glossary, and the work of fiction which made use of the terms established therein. Reservations stifled him from automatically including 'Flyblown' in the crate along with everything else already in there. Was it really useful to give this to Jared? He still couldn't tell whether the raider leader had meant to rib the chemist's perceived uselessness through a sarcastic suggestion that he at least provide entertainment value, or if the comment had been a legitimate request. Would something like this piece even entertain someone besides himself? He decided it might serve the Lexington outfit better for him to instead scrutinize what reading material he'd collected from the checkout stands, so he returned downstairs to the general stock room, where he'd begun preparing the crate he intended to gift Jared's group.

Many of the periodicals had deteriorated beyond any semblance of completeness, though at a glance it seemed several among them at the very least contained in-tact articles. He sorted through them carefully, and picked out any of which he had duplicates. Anything unsalvageable contributed to his cache of scrap paper, while the rest he divided between the care package and the tables of the break room. He'd better sort those he kept at a later point, but he had his mind set on other tasks. With the 'Flyblown' holotape scripted but withheld, and the food and reading materials packed into the crate, 'Choly scrutinized the exact contents of the crate and felt them somehow lacking. He resolved to including the wine he'd nicked from the grocer's as well, and allowed himself some recreation in the break room.

The chemist decided to sample one of the four bottles of Nuka Cola Quantum he'd obtained the day before, and opened it while he pored over some of his new magazine scraps. He smelled of it before taking a sip of the glowing pale blue stuff, noting it reminded of a floral liqueur, but the overall palate of the sweet beverage was superiorly fruity and tart. After a few sips, he identified the prevailing flavor as pomegranate, but even halfway into the bright alcoholic treat he could no better discern the source of its striking luminescence. He admired its intense refreshment, both more mellow and composed than he'd been all day. Once he finished reflecting in a thoughtful detachment over a landscaping magazine, he decided he felt up to scouting out the office floors of the pharmacy building for anything else the raiders might like. He updated Angel as to his whereabouts for the rest of the day, and took his cane with him hooked to his side in case he needed to get out of the wheelchair to reach anything.

He'd skimmed over the fourth floor a few times now whenever he came up to distribute his services from the rooftop, but today he finally took the trouble to pick the lock of what he presumed was a maintenance closet. Inside it he found a few lightbulbs, a mop and broom, several buckets, rags, and a sparse toolbox. His mouth scrunched to one side at the one box of Abraxo left. Nothing extraordinary, he just left all of it where it had stayed the past two hundred years and moved on.

Though the whole building shared an overall design palette, the architectural aesthetic of the office floors demarcated them from the rest, subtly flourished with distinct art deco details endeared in tiered repeating pattern wall pendants and geometric gilt friezes and pediments. He really hadn't paid much attention to any of it before in the times he'd passed through the fourth floor on his way to and from the roof, but somehow it bestowed a sense of elevated position he could appreciate. Clearly, these stories were meant to remain at a far lower level of activity than those beneath them--not that the scant square feet per story in this portion of the building could really accommodate all that much foot traffic in the first place.

On the fifth floor came the accounting office, but 'Choly did not find much in the way of actual on hand funds, only thousands of legers and invoices filed away with tedium. The skeleton of the accountant fell out of the chair in which it had sat since the world ended, and 'Choly jumped. He let out a relieved sigh upon recognition of the source of the dull rattling, and rifled through the desk drawers a bit. With a fistful of pencils, he stared at the partially disarticulated bones in the floor and whet his lips in deliberation. He really hadn't been as prepared as he'd thought when he took the Super Duper Mart, and he hated how little ammunition he'd found thus far for the two calibers of pistol he had acquired in his time unthawed. Even rarer would be the opportunity to find ammuntion designed specifically for the syringer rifle, but he could improvise far more readily with it than with the handguns. Surely, it could deal damage and not just chems. A ragged adenoidal chuckle came out of him as he used his screwdriver as a screwdriver for once, and absconded also with the accountant's pencil sharpener off the wall. Getting this kind of creative sounded like a little too much fun.

A plaque on the sixth floor decreed that it housed the administrative office, and it also offered a small lounge space with two armchairs, and vending machines and a cigarette machine. Upon scrutiny 'Choly found the latter machine had no menthols, and he kicked it and wrote off the odds the administrator had anything of immediate value, wheeling back into the elevator with a disgruntled armful of Potato Crisps and gumdrops. Somehow, he regretted not bringing anything with him to carry what he found, but he could have a vague appreciation that his constitution had inured him to a spacious lap.

He nearly dropped everything as he exited the elevator car on the seventh floor. His jaw dropped in awe at the calm breeze... and the  _view_. An entire hunk of the outer wall had fallen away, leaving another administrative office exposed to the elements. Two birds that had perched near the exposed edge of the peeling floor flew away when they noticed he had joined them. He left the wheelchair in the hall and walked through the open door to sit at the desk and look out over the south end of Lexington. For the most part, he could only see the various gaping interstate overpasses which swept into and out of the city, but still the value of this open air space struck him singularly. After his unceremonious escort to the automotive plant, the mere idea of lounging on the roof didn't seem as secure as it had been in the past. But here, he had fresh air without having to  _step outside_.

The landscaping issue of  _Picket Fences_  he'd read earlier came to mind, and he smiled at the thought of finding plants that would take well to window box treatments. Short of anything decorative, he'd even accept cohabiting with climbing vines or anything that would permit him fresh produce, if either would like the building anywhere as much as he did. Such a project could give him something to dabble with in whatever downtime his new employer would allow him.

On the eighth floor, he found the executive suite. He struggled with the door, and in frustration he stood to get better leverage with the stubborn knob. Taking his cane, he left the mound of retrieved goods in the seat of the chair and entered the suite on foot. One of the three ceiling pendants spasmed, and 'Choly squinted one eye in displeasure at the erratic strobing. The pharmacy's boss had a wet bar in her office, and he smiled at the kismet found in the variety of in tact cut glass decanters. He took up an armful of spirits to deposit them in the chair seat with the rest, and as he turned around to make a second trip, it finally registered that he had not seen the remains of either administrator, or their boss. 

Grief gnarled him up as two terribly warped feral ghouls slinked up from where they'd lain in the floor, standing between him and his prize. He'd left his guns downstairs like some kind of idiot.

Hyperventilating, he fell back on his butt. The stumble knocked the wheelchair to roll away from him, and he truly panicked. One ghoul, the one with candy pink tatters, lunged, and with a dread-stifled and choked-out yelp, he swept his cane at its face. The swing connected and the feral ghoul recoiled, only to fall back on the other ghoul. For good measure, he whipped his cane through their legs on their way down, and he scrambled backwards as fast as he could.

Head pounding, he slammed the office door shut and worked as quickly as he could with shaking hands, a bobby pin, and a screwdriver. He couldn't think of a time he'd ever lockpicked a door to  _lock_  it. With a hard swallow, he leaned into the wall beside the door to catch his breath, knuckles white around his cane in the possibility that the lock hadn't latched in place.

"Ah, Sir! Door giving you trouble?"

'Choly clawed at his dress shirt, and his legs went out under him and he slid down the wall. His Mister Handy had come to check on him, but in the fray he hadn't heard the elevator.

"Bozhe moy, eto tol'ko ty." 'Choly choked a bit on the thickness of his mouth, and wiped his face with his sleeve. "Angel. Am I ever happy to see you."

"Did I startle you?"

"Did you--" 'Choly shoved down a sarcastic laugh and smiled at the robot instead. "What startled me was. Never mind. Just help me carry this stuff downstairs, if you could, please. And leave that door locked."

"So it goes, Sir."

Later that evening, 'Choly and Angel returned upstairs. They found the door still locked, and the chemist sighed, loosening his grip on his syringer rifle. Sweating, he picked the lock, and pushed the door open. The light still flickered, and the ghouls had laid back down. As they sat up, he pushed backwards in his chair and took aim from where he sat, and fired off at close range a pencil-dart at each of the ferals. One landed in the neck, the other, its chest, and within seconds, they toppled over in agonized rigor. Adjusting his glasses with a haunted smirk, he put a hand out to keep Angel from involvement, and watched. The odd cocktail of substances with which he'd saturated the pencil lead yielded a rapid onset of paralysis so acute the feral ghouls seemed nearly unable to even draw a breath.

"I hate to have to kill them, really," he began, mostly to himself, "but I know I wouldn't be able to sleep knowing they're still here. There's no telling whether they'd be able to muster the faculties to let themselves out of the suite, or to use the elevator. I don't like it."

"They're incorrigible, Sir. Would you rather I took care of it?"

He pulled out his .38 and cocked it.

"I need to get over myself sooner or later, don't I? Stop seeing shadows of the past in everything I encounter. There's nothing but rancor and pain left in these things." He fired one round, then another, then two more for thoroughness. His eyes did not quit the two ferals. Straining against his trembling, he let the gun cool a bit before he set it down in his lap. "Just like I'm not who I was before the apocalypse, neither are they."

"...Bravo. I'll be sure to dispose of them first thing in the morning."

That night, Melancholy dreamt again of visiting the recoolant station to see Hawthorne as a ghoul, but this time 'Choly was forced to kill him. A swig of scotch burned away the immediate loathing of the nightmare, and another numbed him enough to fall back asleep.


	17. Chapter 17

Coming off the scaffolding to one of the yet-incomplete high rises in Lexington, 'Choly dismounted Angel and leaned toward the rubble which topped the building. A sizable measure of the interstate overpass had fallen, and with it, a freightliner, now decaying at the top of an apartment building that would likely never be finished. The chemist sighed and sat on some of it. Waiting around for Jared to come calling had only compounded his anxiety. He had to get out of the pharmacy to clear his head, and wandering the ruins of Lexington seemed as good a distraction as any. From where he rested, he could see the pharmacy sign, and he squinted dryly a moment before failing to smooth back his messy bun and continuing around the ruined apartments. 

Rounding the freightliner, he came across catwalk scaffolding which ran between a pair of billboards over the street, and he strolled across it. The breeze elicited a faint smile, and he got most of the way across the makeshift bridge before it clicked that he had passed a bed roll... and a duffel bag... and a lit lantern... and a chem box... He choked up hearing heavy mechanical steps behind him, and he motioned to Angel to follow in kind as he stumbled to the other side of the bridge to duck around the side of the wall and hope he wasn't caught trespassing. The military chemist knew that sound anywhere. The person who inhabited this precarious venue had power armor--and abandon only knew what else. 

"Who's up here?" The source of the rough, effeminate voice got closer, and with a shaking finger to his mouth 'Choly looked up at Angel, who looked down at him with tense sensor-posing. He motioned to let it mount its harness again, and it blinked its sensor-irises at him in agreement. "Lonnie? I told you, you're not takin' my turret." 

A disembodied " _shit!_ " snapped behind them after Angel fired up its thrusters again and followed 'Choly's direction that they sprint across what had once partly been a kitchen area to the stairwell, and hasten down the stairs in an attempt to escape. Eyes glass-wide, 'Choly glued his face flush to the top of the Mister Handy, paranoid of head clearance as the Handy deftly turned on a dime to slingshot across a commons area exposed to the elements by missing walls. It didn't waste time taking the stairwell on the other side, now having also attracted the attention of the feral ghouls who had rested and around the commons' sofa. 

At ground level, they zipped to the left to avoid the majority of bricks and concrete which littered the sidewalk around the stairwell door. Rather than risk the raider in power armor following them back to the pharmacy, 'Choly instead instructed Angel to duck into another high rise apartment building. Once inside, he fretted a moment at the discovery of more ferals, but quickly unclenched seeing they'd already been taken care of. A good bit of the first floor had collapsed in, especially one far corner. He noted that the damages there looked more explosive in nature than like structural failings, and he put a hand to his mouth to keep himself from laughing aloud at understanding that someone had used something like a mini-nuke to break down the wall rather than tolerate hacking the terminal which had once locked a security door. There was something to be said of finesse. 

He wondered to himself, as they scaled the stairs, what they might have been so impatient to retrieve from such a room. They came upon a room, with walls little more than support beams, which had likely once functioned as a craftsman's workspace. Most of the tools had already been looted, but the bench remained. He gestured for Angel to power down its thruster again and crouch with him here, and once they both resumed hiding, he sighed. They could remain here until the coast was clear. 

After some time, his restless mind got to scrutinizing the remaining effects of the apartment that used to occupy this space. His eyes fell on a wall safe, and he whet his lips and scooted nearer to it. Out came a bobby pin from his hair and the screwdriver. His ear went to the door, his tongue ever so slightly to the corner of his mouth. This building didn't look like anyone had lived in it since before everything went bottoms-up, so he could help himself to this fidgeting prize conscience-free, a little more quietly than whoever had emptied out that room downstairs. With a long-delayed success, he tucked the bobby pin in his hair and his screwdriver back in his pocket, and he used his fingertips to pull the edges of the door toward him slowly. He found a stack of cash and a fistful of silver jewelry, as well as a pistol. 

Melancholy detachedly tucked the cash and heirlooms into his pockets, his nostalgia focused upon the firearm now in his lap. An M1895 Nagant revolver. This apartment had belonged to a war veteran, and the gun had likely been an American's war trophy from a felled Soviet in the Chinese theater. He found no 7.62 bullets to go with it, and had little hope of coming across any since the caliber was far more common for European or Soviet weapons; but, coming across one of the most common-issue firearms he grew up surrounded by still comforted him somehow. With a grin, he pocketed the ivory-handle gun. 

"Saw that robot go this way. Little fucker can't be far behind it." 

In a panic, 'Choly could survey no way out of his hiding place besides rushing the same stairs, and armed himself with his .38 as he heard multiple footsteps ascending nearer. The power armor raider had Jared with her, and when they both caught sight of the two of them crouched in the corner hiding, Jared blurted out a sarcastic laugh. 

"Chemist, I've been looking for you. My sentinel Jerry tells me you were snooping around in her things. When I said you could travel the city without opposition, I didn't mean you could just enter my people's dwellings uninvited." 

'Choly didn't drop his grip on the pistol, frozen in place staring at the power armor itself. Even just the exposed frame itself unsettled him; although the blonde with razor-streaked short hair didn't have any of the plates or a helmet on the frame, she still exhibited a massive range of physical control and force that someone without one could not. 

"This-- it's all a misunderstanding," 'Choly tried. "I didn't touch a thing in her place. I didn't mean to--" 

"--Enough." Jared pinched at his nose bridge. "I care less whether you took anything and more why you weren't where I told you to be. I said I would come get you when I was ready. My raiders brought news to me that they saw you leaving the SDM, and now I've found you playing hide and seek in the apartments. Either you're foolhardy as hell, or just plain stupid." 

"You're--" 'Choly scrunched his nose to adjust the bridge of his glasses. "You're here to get me for work? This isn't about... Jerry's things?" 

"If I find any chems missing," she sneered, "I know who to come to." 

"--Can it!" Jared snapped his teeth at her to quieten her. "Yes, I'm here to collect you. When you wouldn't answer your comm, I noticed your note that you'd be nearby, and Jerry told me she saw you run this way. Please don't make it this difficult to locate you in the future. I'll have to get... stern." 

"Can I meet you at the factory in an hour?" 'Choly finally dropped his firearm to his lap. "I have equipment and materials to pick up, and I need to eat something before we get started." 

"Don't make me regret saying yes." Jared and Jerry stood there and stared him down. "Well? Get going." 

Angel had aimed its laser at the two of them the entire time, but put it away to power its thruster back up and escort its owner off. 

After inhaling a Salisbury steak, 'Choly located a flatbed cart in the stock room and had Angel load it up with the care package crate, as well as the case of inhalers. The chemist wheeled himself in the chair while the Handy pushed along the cart behind him. As the two jaunted down the street and passed the Battle Green, they heard a finger-whistle. 'Choly whipped his head up to see Jerry on the catwalk over the street, peeking through the gap to one side of the billboard which advertised the city's Slocum's Joe. 

"Get to work, runt," she hollered at him, then broke into pointed laughter. 

" _Working_ on it." His attempt at wit got her laughing again, and they continued on when they were confident she was teasing them and not warning them. 

Upon arriving at the factory, a couple of scouts, positioned around the catwalks of the main entrance, hooted and hollered that 'Choly had a robot. He could have sworn he heard one of them wish he'd tell him where he could get a robot that would follow orders. Angel heard something 'Choly did not and flinched, but said nothing as to rise above it. The pair took the elevator to the assembly floor, and scaled the ramp to the mezzanine with the foreman's office, where Jared awaited them with a beer in hand and total impatience on his face. 

"Christ, chemist. You told me you'd only be an hour. I was just about to come rip you out of that pharmacy myself." 

"I had more to get together than I thought," 'Choly apologized, removing his glasses long enough to wipe his face on his sleeve. He motioned for Angel to pull the smaller crate off the top of the larger one, then pointed to the big one and looked to Jared. "I'm sure what I've got for you will be to your liking. This is Angel, by the way." 

"A pleasure, I hope," it interjected at a caution. 

Jared sustained eye contact with the Handy at length before he jumped up and was about to begin pacing. 

"You said you were getting together equipment for our project. That's what I'm going to like--" Angel took the lid off the aluminum crate and Jared gawked at the variety of contents. His comment abruptly dropped into a low whistle. "What's this now?" 

"Well, I told you that I'd split the supermarket salvage with you, if you gave me permission to go in there. It's up to you how to, or whether you want to, distribute it among your outfit. I suppose the whole crate's yours alone, if you want. It's mostly junk food, but if you're anything like me, creature comforts make such a difference." 

"You are the craziest motherfucker I have ever met." Jared shook a box of Sugar Bombs cereal and stared at it, then with animation he rifled through the crate to get a basic idea of the extent of things included in it. "Do you have any idea how many ferals are in there? ...No, were? Christ. I can't believe this. First aid, chems, decent food-- and nine entire bottles of red wine? Tribute accepted," he grinned. 

"Tribute-- I, yes, you're most welcome, of course." Dumbstricken to see Jared so chipper, 'Choly eventually motioned for Angel to open the smaller crate. "And of course, there's also the paraphernalia I promised." 

"Hopefully, you won't stop ceasing to amaze me anytime soon." Jared inspected one of the empty inhaler ampuoles, then put it back. "Let's get cracking." 

The area 'Choly had scoped out to transform into their distillation workspace lay tucked in one corner of the assembly floor, and had once provided welding tank lines to the mechanical arms which pieced together the automobiles. With the two water heater tanks Jared had produced at 'Choly's request, they would craft the means to drive off the desired gases from manure, and under pressure, funnel it off into single metered doses. Like knowing the smell of a skunk, the distinct salty musk of brahmin manure carried with it a sensory imprint someone can't forget. And the place already reeked of it before they'd even gotten the equipment far enough along to load it in. The chemist wouldn't dare ask where Jared had gotten hold of the stuff, considering how badly that conversation had gone the time before. 'Choly and Jared worked, for the most part, in strained silence. Angel idled nearby and assisted with lifting metal components as requested. 

"I hope you like the Nuka Cola." 'Choly eyeballed a feeder pipe and tried to assess where his theoretical schematics would connect to it. "I know it's nothing like it used to be, but to be honest, I've come to enjoy it better than wine. The cherry's my favorite, so I hope you don't mind that I kept most of those for myself." 

"Yeah, it's all right. More interested in the caps that come from emptying them." Down on the polished concrete floor, Jared grunted as he worked at tightening the threads of a bolt around a pipe. "What do you mean, like it used to be? Stop being cryptic with me." 

"Well, it's not carbonated anymore. And it's alcoholic now. Just as refreshing either way, I suppose." 

"The fuck is carbonation?" 

'Choly idled, hung up on words. 

"Mm, it was _fizzy_. It had bubbles. I suppose champagne might not still be _fizzy_ either. I liked carbonation." 

"Do you always have this much trouble separating what's real from what you see when you're high? I've never heard a single person describe Nuka Cola like that." 

"Hey now, I've only had my Mentats today," 'Choly defended. He traced a finger through the air to where he finally determined the pipe to end up, and snapped his fingers with resolution, scribbling down further notes in his lap. "I just... miss how a lot of things used to be. Sorry if my talking about it's depressing." 

"What's _depressing_ is that your trips just make you see into the past." Jared fermented, narrowly not flinging his adjustable wrench across the assembly floor. "Useless! Can't you fuckin' see _forward_?" 

'Choly stopped and set the pencil in his lap, and zoned out with his gaze toward the distillation boilers. He couldn't make sense of what Jared could mean, but could at least recognize his competency was in question. Massaging at his knees, he bit at his lips and glanced over to Jared. 

"A lot of prewar knowledge can't not have died with civilization. Some of that knowledge is what's crafting this equipment that's going to produce chems for your outfit." 

Jared couldn't argue with that, and the silence returned. 

After that, Jared would sometimes break strings of silence with random questions about what the world was like two hundred years ago, just to prod 'Choly into shuttling stories the accuracy of which the raider couldn't be entirely certain. Either way, he couldn't hardly shut up the chemist once he got going, and at least it was entertaining if not educational. Maybe there was some value in the past, after all.


End file.
